Thks for responses. Please accept that I don't know too much about logins and shells - I just run my knoppix on hd system and login on whatever Knoppix sets up (I assume it's using kdm since it's KDE based, though I've added gnome) So I gather from Michael that my best bet is to: in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99xfree86-common_start remove exec $STARTUP and paste exec -l $SHELL -c "$STARTUP" will this now default to bash? Or how do I specify bash? thks. John --