Quote Originally Posted by clintonian
Exactly where is the divergence point during boot when the system would say "execute kdm" rather than "execute startx" I have looked everywhere. Man - this shouldn't be this hard...
No it shouldn't...

Quote Originally Posted by I
kdm (or gdm, or xdm) is normally started via /etc/inittab in run level 5.
So, translating even further:

1. Do a "man inittab" and read the manual page ("manpage") of inittab and its format. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that "man kdm" will be of any use - it should be, but it isn't (kdm is undocumented - sigh)...

2. Open /etc/inittab in your favorite editor (I use vi - and proudly, too!).

3. Edit the line which is run for run level 5 and which runs startx.

4. Change this line (which runs startx) to run kdm instead. It looks as if kdm should take a "-nodaemon" option; I'd recommend using it - it's probably needed.

After having done this, if you want this preserved for use with a CDROM distribution, then you need to either burn a new CD with this new configuration or save the configuration somewhere so that it can be loaded during boot.