I noticed that KDE takes a long time even when using startx, but I waited half an hour. I also tried to connect the monitor to the second output, but nothing was there either. So I powercycled the machine. The IBM 6894-10X uses Matrox G450, according to the specs at IBM's site. SuSE installed a G400. I will try to set to G450, although with startx everything seems to work fine.

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I've seen a similiar issue to your kdm problem on our (HP's) i2000 workstations. A workaround is using gdm instead of kdm, and it seems to have been fixed when we updated to the 2.4.16 kernel. Good luck. Regards, Jeff