Andrei spoketh:
#aptitude purge gdmshould do the trick. If you have nothing else than kdm installed, than "he" will have no other choice but using it :)
and Kent spoketh:
sounds like it thinks kdm is already the default. I would run the program again, choosing gdm, then run it a final time, choosing kdm again.> So for the alternate method - I do have a /etc/inittab file with the > line "id:5:initdefault:" in it, but there is no line > "x:5:respawn:/usr/X11R6/bin/..." to change to > "x:5:respawn:/opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon" and I'm not sure if an where > I should put the line. Maybe it no longer even belongs in this file???This is for distros that have X start in runlevel 5; ignore these instructions for use on Debian, which has the identical runlevels 2 - 5. (Or, if you wanted, you could make these changes; that's the beauty of Debian; you can configure it the way you, the sysadm, want it configured. But I would recommend making these changes until you're more familiar with runlevels and inittab, etc.)
I did a full shutdown, then when I booted the kdm login screen came up. To make sure there wasn't any further confusion I then purged gdm (and in the process cleaned up more Gnome stuff I would not be using). So I have a boot screen that "she who must be obeyed" is happy with.
With the Gnome login screen I could login as root though and I can't seem to find a way to allow such with the kdm login screen. Not sure I need to though, because I can use the root terminal or sudo in terminal, and there seems to be a "File Manager - Super User Mode" to traverse the directories and edit a file in a GUI.
So it seems that with your valuable help I'm ready to move on to the next issue I can create :-)
OT: Due next month to have these old eyes laser scrubbed again. Then maybe I'll be able to find more through research.
Thank you and my best to you and yours, Lee C