Quentin Hartman wrote: > On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Michael M. Moore > <[email protected]> wrote: >> removing what's already here as it is, should I reinstall this? And the >> reason for that is, as I intimated, primarily as learning experience. > > I had missed that nuance. Based on your expanded explanation, I think > this would be a great, useful exercise. And to simply answer the > "core" question (again?), no, you do not "need" display manager for > "normal" single-user installs. I ran without a display manager for > years and years, and was never at a disadvantage for it. > > But. > > Unless you already have multiple computers, and perhaps even if you > do, consider doing your paring and learning in a virtual machine. > VMware server and Virtual Box are free and quite capable > virtualization environments.
Thanks for the advice. Virtualization and the various methods for doing that is yet another thing I've been meaning to try, and will make a point of doing so before I reinstall. > regardless of which you choose, the odds of you ending up cornered > because you tatered your primary computer are much smaller, which is > always a good thing. I do have an old iMac on which I dual-boot a dated (and increasingly semi-useless) version of OS X and Debian (PPC, recently upgraded to Lenny). It's not exactly a joy to use, but it has gotten me out of jams when I've mucked something up on my main computer and need to figure out how to fix things. I'll check out Breakin. I already had this machine looked at by professionals, who suggested it was probably the video card, which I've replaced. That made things better for a while, but then the problem (machine freezes, keyboard and mouse is unresponsive) started coming back. Then I removed GNOME, switching to Openbox, and no more freezes, until two days ago, when it did it again. There's no pattern to it. It's always the same problem -- machine is working great, then just freezes -- but there's no obvious trigger, like heavy load or problematic application(s). Once, but only once, I got the blinking keyboard lights that I believe indicates a kernel panic. Michael M. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
