Roadrunner on Linux

[Sam Clippinger]

When last we left our heroes, Dana had just said:
> However I did make one mistake.  I told it to automatically
> start KDE on startup and now I can not turn off KDE.  When 
> I log off KDE it takes me to the KDE login screen which only
> allows me to go back to KDE or to shutdown the system.
> What do I have to edit to get back my command line?

You should be able to do a couple of things.  First off, chances are very
high that there is a text console running behind X.  Try hitting Ctrl-Alt-F1
to get to it.  Once you're there, you can Alt-F* around on whatever consoles
are available.  Getting back to X is easy: just switch to the console beyond
whatever your highest numbered console is.  So (for example) if you have 4
virtual consoles available and X is running in the background, Alt-F5 will get
you back to X.

The program that makes X prompt you for a username and password is called xdm.
Mandrake is a RedHat-derived distribution, which means it should use the
SysV-style init scripts.  You should have two ways to shut off xdm: The first
is to remove the symlink in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d that points to ../init.d/xdm.  It'll
be named S__xdm, where __ is a number from 00 to 99.  I've never used Mandrake
before, so I /could/ be mistaken about that.  The other option is to use your
favorite GUI configuration tool to remove xdm from your list of daemons launched
at startup.  I don't personally use GUI config tools, so I apologize that I
can't be any more specific than that.

I hope that helps!

                                -sam

 Sam Clippinger               For PGP public key (KEY ID: 431C5529), see
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