Michael Fothergill wrote: > > Dear X people, I'm not the best one to answer this (I'm no expert on RedHat or Gnome), but until somebody else responds I can offer a few clues. > > Is it the case that when you run startx in a standard Linux environment e.g. > Red Hat 7.1 that gdm is fired up if you are running gnome?
You can't be "running" gnome unless X11 is already running. I thought that a normal RedHat installation would have automatically set up X11 and a graphical login that would start Gnome as soon as you logged in. Did you do something unusual in the installation? > When I run xwindow as root everything workd fine, What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean that you logged in as root at a text-mode login prompt and ran startx and Gnome started up? > but as a regular user I > seem to run a proxy window manager and then I get a complaint from gnome > that the window manager I am using or the version of X I have does not > support gnome.... I don't understand what you mean here by "proxy window manager". Could this be TWM, the window manager that comes with the Sample Implementation of X? > I tried to fire up the system by typiing in gdm at start > up instead of startx but the system said "only root wants to run gdm". I > found gdm in /usr/bin and I changed the ownership from root ro the user > hoping that I could run gdm directly but it made no difference.... How can > I fix the problem? GDM is Gnome's own "enhancement" of xdm, just as KDM is KDE's. These things put up a graphical Login prompt when X11 is running. You type in your account name and password and XDM/GDM/KDM steps aside and runs xinit for you, which starts your window manager. Not only are XDM/GDM/KDM only run by root, they're not meant to be run from an interactive command prompt, but automatically from init when the system starts up. Look back a few days in the list archives for what I wrote on xdm. I don't know anything about RedHat 7.1's installation process, but if you want the machine to be a graphical workstation you need to find the trick to get GDM to run automatically at startup. I think RedHat uses a SysV style inittab mechanism; some RedHat guru please step in here with the details. Very important: You need to put the ownership and all the permission bits back the way they were, and read up on file ownership and permissions. On Unix systems, the chmod man page in section 2 is a good place to start. Again, some RedHat guru please step in. The coolest GUI imaginable won't protect you from having to learn a few fundamentals, like the significance of file ownership and permissions. -- Remember, more computing power was thrown away last week than existed in the world in 1982. -- http://www.tom.womack.net/computing/prices.html _______________________________________________ Newbie mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** To unsubscribe , or change message options, see: http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/newbie
