On Thursday 14 April 2005 20:03, Anders Johansson wrote:
update vs. full install of KDE? How do you mean?
I just mean that I got rid of 3.3 before installing 3.4. In the past, I used to upgrade from within the current version, then just stop and restart X, but this time I read a few too many accounts of problems with that approach.
About your problem: the startx script starts the window manager defined by the environment variable $WINDOWMANAGER. If at the command prompt you run
echo $WINDOWMANAGER
you will see what it's set to.
fvwm is what the system defaults to if it can't find the program set by $WINDOWMANAGER (well, it's the second choice, if it can't find kde) as you can see in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc
I believe your problem is caused by a name change (or packaging problem). WINDOWMANAGER is set to 'kde' while the new kde doesn't provide the 'kde' link.
I think you can probably solve your problem by running the command
ln -s /opt/kde3/bin/startkde /usr/X11R6/bin/kde
You can change the system default window manager (and therefore the default value of the $WINDOWMANAGER variable) by editing the script /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager
Thanks for the good, succinct explanation. It's nice when somebody explains something and I actually find the same stuff in the same places. :-) Is there a reason you suggested creating the link, rather than just editing lines in xinitrc? I'm not really good at implications unless they're spelled out, or I trip over them. Kevin