Moving from *dm to the console

[Sjoerd Hiemstra <shiems146@kpnplanet.nl>]

Hi,

During 7 years I have seen no other distro than SUSE.
I think it's a pity that it is not a European distro any more.
Much of its hype, its ideals and its friendly character has gone.
And when its new owner went to collaborate with a company that clearly
has far from noble intentions, it definitely drove me away from it.

In my search for another distro, Debian looked interesting.
Well, its moral standards are certainly higher than Microvell's.


One of my main questions now is how to log in on the console, which I
prefer to using *dm, and start different window managers from there.
In SUSE it goes like this:

    startx <windowmanager>

but in Debian this does not work.

Following the Debian Reference, I renamed /etc/rc2.d/S*dm to K*dm.
Based on my prior knowledge, in /usr/local/bin I created scripts like
these:

to start kde:

    export WINDOWMANAGER=kde
    startx -- -dpi 96

to start blackbox:

    export WINDOWMANAGER=blackbox
    startx -- -dpi 96

and I created ~/.xinitrc with lines like these:

    if test $WINDOWMANAGER = kde ; then /usr/bin/startkde
    if test $WINDOWMANAGER = blackbox ; then exec blackbox

However, it appears not to be possible to start the default Gnome
desktop this way. The usual 'startx' does not work either as long as
~/.xinitrc exists, even if ~/.xinitrc is empty.
So to use Gnome, I have to rename ~/.xinitrc to something else.

It does function this way, but it's getting rather messy, and it looks
like this is not the way it is intended to be.

So what is the Debian way, I wonder.  Am I missing something?

TIA,
S.H.