Re: Questions from a new debian user

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

"Phoenix Amon" <phoenix@directiondesigns.com> wrote:
>Hi Hillary. I'm about a week newer to Linux that you are... I know your
>bewilderment well. :)
>
>> 1. Is there a way to exit X without halting the computer?  The methods
>> I've tried have either shut down the computer correctly or 
>> brought me back
>> to the X login prompts.
>
>If you're in the login screen and you haven't yet logged in, you should
>be able to CTRL-ALT-Backspace to exit to the plain terminal. This worked
>for me with plain XDM. It did not work with KDM however, and I deleted
>KDM in frustration. :)

I think xdm is the one that's broken here (on your installation); kdm's
behaviour here is what's supposed to happen with both. Ctrl-Alt-F1 to
Ctrl-Alt-F6 is the way you get to a virtual console, or '/etc/init.d/xdm
stop' if you want to close down X altogether. ('/etc/init.d/xdm start'
restarts it.)

Have a look in /var/log/xdm.log and see if you can find out why xdm
isn't restarting the X server (or perhaps you've deliberately set it
that way somewhere in /etc/X11/xdm?).

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]