X startup / KPPP / boot floppy
I've been using RH for a couple of years (RH5.2, 6.0, 7.2) and I thought I'd
try Debian 3.0. I did a new install but ran into some weird behaviour (or
at least, stuff I don't understand) so I'm back with RH for now. Sorry if
some of my questions are a bit elementary. And any comparisons with Red Hat
are *not* intended to imply that RH is better, just what I'm used to.
When I first tried to launch X, it failed with various messages like 'no
screens found' (exactly the same always seems to happen with RH). I
eventually got this sorted in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 but it may have caused
some X startup settings to get corrupted. Anwyay, next time I booted, it
went straight into Gnome, it wouldn't let me log in as root, only as me, a
user, and if logged out it presented the same login screen again. I
couldn't even shut down. The only way I could get out of X was Alt-Ctrl-F1,
then when I tried startx it logged me into KDE.
So question 1, which file determines whether one gets a command-line or a X
login on startup? And whether it invokes gnome or KDE? My strong
preference is for a command-line login, and invoke Gnome on starting X.
Next, kppp - it would dial my ISP, but then drop off the line with "Remote
system is required to authenticate itself but couldn't find suitable secret
(password) for it to do so (None of the available passwords would let it use
an IP address)". After reading the help files I put "noauth" in KPPP's
setup 'customize pppd arguments' which seems to work. However,
applications like Kmail and browsers are not communicating with kppp, not
even if I'm logged in as root. I get no error messages that I can recall,
just the modem lights do not show anything happening when I click on a URL or
on Send / Get mail. Is this a permissions thing? (kppp works fine out of
the box in Red Hat).
Third, LILO doesn't work, I'm having to boot off a floppy (same goes for Red
Hat). However, the Debian floppy takes forever to read and boot. Is this
normal? (Red Hat is quite quick off a floppy). Eventually I'll try and
sort LILO to work properly, but having a reasonable speed of floppy booting
would help in the meantime.
Please forgive me if these are elementary questions, if I can get some
promising answers I'll try installing Debian again.
Regards
Chris Rodliffe
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