kdm - safe to remove?

[bionnaki]

greetings. I am new to kde/kubuntu having used mostly gnome-based distros before. I have a unique setup that requires I do a few customizations. Long, long story...

once thing I need to do is remove kdm. I'd like a simple, text based login. is it safe to remove kdm? will running with a login manager always erase any sessions-data? I see that there is something called "kdm-session-data" or something (cannot recall the exact name) that will also be removed via apt-get.

also, if I were to use a text login, what command would I use to start kde? startkde? or just startx?

is it possible to remove the "logout" button from the kmenu? how would I do this?

thanks!

[analyticalman]

Re: kdm - safe to remove?

Well - I thought this was an easy question to answer - just change the default runlevel from 5 to 3 (text based login) Alas I learnt that on Ubuntu based systems this is not the case. Default runlevel is 2 and it runs various daemons from that runlevel. So as I had started down this road I kept going - and this is what I did to achieve a text based login. There are other ways I'm sure but this worked for me.

Ensure the Universe repositories are enabled (see here if you don't know how to do it)
http://psychocats.net/ubuntu/sources

Open your package manager, adept or whatever (or apt-get from the console) and install BUM (the boot up manager) Launch it Untick the KDE Display manager (kdm) option. When you next reboot you have a text login.

My text login was not pretty - therefore I altered the boot parameters like this:

type alt F2 then kdesu kate /boot/grub/menu.lst You should see a big file and at the end of it something that looks like this

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-26-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386
savedefault
boot

Before you start modifying it - save it as something else so you have a backup

I added the following to the kernel line nosplash vga=771 so the section looks like this

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-26-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet nosplash vga=771
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386
savedefault
boot

Save it and then reboot - you should have a nicer looking text login. Hope it helps

[kubicle]

Re: kdm - safe to remove?

Open your package manager, adept or whatever (or apt-get from the console) and install BUM (the boot up manager) Launch it  Untick the KDE Display manager (kdm)  option.  When you next reboot you have a text login.

You can also disable kdm from the 'system services' Control Center module (you don't necessarily need BUM for it)

kdesu kcmshell serviceconfig