Anders Johansson wrote: ----------------->>>> add export WINDOWMANAGER=/usr/X11R6/bin/gnome to ~/.bashrc I believe it's called gnome-session instead of gnome if you're running ximian. ----------------->>>> First of all thanks Anders for replying and replying and replying... I appreciate it. Adding that to .bashrc in the users home dir didn't do anything. After exiting and logging back in I ran startx and it still went into kde. So I exited kde and check the var with echo $WINDOWMANAGER which replied with /usr/X11R6/kde so I just export $WINDOWMANAGER=/usr/X11R6/gnome at the command prompt and then did a startx and it went into gnome. So I went into /etc/rc.config and changed: DEFAULT_WM="kde" -to- DEFAULT_WM="gnome" and ran SuSEconfig then exited and logged in again and sure enough echo $WINDOWMANAGER replied with /usr/X11R6/gnome, then running startx started with GNOME as the wm. Not sure why the file you describe, .bashrc wasn't being parsed.