I'm trying to setup a machine running KDE. it's supposed to look pretty (no need for console), so I want kdm. xdm isn't pretty enough, and lacks the shutdown option which is a must.
First, I tried running kdm from the command line. Kind of worked, but when I logged in, no matter what session I picked, i wound up with just an xterm. This was fixed by running genkdmconf which did some stuff. I don't know why this was needed. Now, the problem was whenever I quit KDE, it would drop me back at a command prompt. xdm didn't have this problem. I thought maybe kdm is only a one shot deal? After finding the handbook (which cannot be located by searching for either kdm documentation or kdm manual), it has a part about FreeBSD and changing /etc/ttys to run kdm like a getty. DO NOT DO THIS. It kinda works, except your keyboard will go crazy. Solution to this: Edit /usr/local/share/config/kdmrc and find the line about TerminateServer and change it to true. For some reason, when you quit KDE, kdm can't talk to X anymore. If it kills and restarts the server, all is well. Of course, now the screen blinks a few more times and it takes longer. Final part. I wanted kdm to start automatically on boot. Once it was out of /etc/ttys, I had to put it back into /etc/rc.local. Doing that appeared to work, except there was no keyboard input. See above. Finally I resorted to writing a script, startkdm, which I run in the background from rc.local. startkdm sleeps 10 seconds before actually execing kdm. So, everything works now, but I'm fairly certain this was harder than it was supposed to be. How is it supposed to work?
