Re: Can't start GNOME

[Judith Samson <judith samson usaserve net>]

If you already have X running, Ctrl-Alt-Fx doesn't get you out of X; it
merely opens another shell session. If you were to press Alt-F7, you
would go right back into your X session.

Could you be more specific about the message you are getting when you
run switchdesk? Are you getting an installation error? 

To get to a command line prompt within X, you have to open an X
terminal. In KDE there is an icon that looks like a terminal with a
shell (for shell prompt, I guess)that opens xterm. From there, type
"switchdesk," and the switchdesk window should open. Check "gnome" and
log out of KDE. When you restart X, Gnome should run. If it doesn't,
keep reading.

There should be two files in your home directory that switchdesk
creates--.Xclients and .Xclients-default. Open .Xclients-default in a
text editor. It should have only one line:

exec gnome-session

If it doesn't, then switchdesk isn't working properly. You can also edit
your X files (sorry, I couldn't resist) by hand, but which file you
should edit depends on how you start the X server. 

If you start X with xdm or kdm, edit your .xsession file to have exec
gnome-session as the last line in the file. 

If you start X with xinit (if you type the command "startx" to start the
X server, then you are using xinit), you should edit your .xinitrc (or
.Xinitrc, I can't remember which is right) to have exec gnome-session as
the last line, UNLESS .xinitrc makes a reference to .Xclients, in which
you should add the exec gnome-session to .Xclients.

If you edit .xsession, .xinitrc or .Xclients by hand, be sure to comment
out "startkde," or KDE will start before the script gets to GNOME.

It really is much easier just to get switchdesk working right. Install
both switchdesk-kde and switchdesk-gnome.

Judith

Brandon Dorman wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>      I have RH 6.0.  Because of previous installs that failed, my cd got
> scratched.  (long story)  I couldn't install GNOME off the cd, so I just
> did KDE.  Now I've downloaded GNOME, but when I rpm it, it will install,
> but I can't get it to run.  I'm sure it's easy, but I don't see it.
> switchdesk-gnome says something about gdk something.  How do you get to
> just an x prompt?  I control-F1'd to get to that, but I know it's not
> true commandline because typing, "startx" will bring up stuff saying
> that the x server is already running.  Thanks.
> 
> Brandon Dorman
> brandond@lightspeed.net
> 
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