Starting KDE automatically

I installed the latest and greatest Slackware Linux 8.0 and everything is hunky dory. How can I config it to start KDE automatically so my female unit can start the durn thing and play games geek-free? The last version of Linux I had on a box was Cauldera and it started the GUI automatically.

Sorry if some of this is obvious to you..


GNU/Linux systems work with a series of "runlevels", which you can put the system into. Each runlevel represents the number of programs/services running. So there's a runlevel for booting, a runlevel for shutting down, a runlevel for being in the shell, and a runlevel for being in X.

Systems have one file which controls these runlevels by defining each one and what should be run in that runlevel (usually /etc/inittab). In Slackware I think runlevel 3 is the shell, and runlevel 4 (or 5?) is X.

What you need to do is open the runlevel file (/etc/inittab) and find what runlevel corresponds to X (KDE), and then find the line that tells your system what the default runlevel is, and change it to be the runlevel for X. So you change from:

id:3:initdefault:

To

id:4:initdefault:

Where that could be 4 or 5, I forget. Hope that helps

Runlevel numbers differ between distros. Try 5 first, that seems to be quite common for X with network.

Thanks for the info - for Slackware Linux, the inittab had notes in there explaining how to use each runlevel. For this installation, it was runlevel 4. Interestingly enough, booting directly into X gave me other options such as which window manager I could use as well.

Now if I can just get Samba to work....

Thanks again.

That'll be because runlevel 4 tells your system to launch X, and a program called "KDM" (the KDE variant of "XDM" which is rarely used now), which is basically a graphical login system, replacing getty (the login system on the console). It also lets you choose which window manager/desktop environment you use, which is an easy way to experiment

If you go back to console mode (which can be done by typing "init 3" as root in a console whilst in X/KDE/GNOME etc), and then run "kdm" instead of "startx", you'll notice you get the same login screen again. The same goes for typing "init 4" in runlevel 3.

Oh and as for samba, if you're using KDE, and you at least have samba installed, KDE handles the smb protocol very nicely, so you can just type "smb://hostname" in a konqueror window and it'll browse the host for you much like in Windows. You can also use a program called "lisa" which I haven't tried yet but which is supposed to make it all even easier, letting you scan the network for hosts etc. It all makes learning samba an awful lot easier to begin with than trying to figure it out from the shell (though it's always worth learning how to use it in the shell as well )