Starting XFce4 without kdm or gdm

[Jack Coates]

On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 08:40, Paul M. Bucalo wrote:
...
> <big sigh of understanding>
> 
> Yeah...I know. I'm already in the process of moving away from Mandrake.
> My hardware is not cutting-edge or state-of-the-art. The hassles that
> come from using an O/S that is being released just a little faster than
> the bridge burns behind it is really taking its toll on me. I don't have
> the time to fix what gets released broken or is too aggressive for what
> I am running. It's great for what it portends to be, but I'm not sure
> it's the best learning tool for a beginners. There's something to be
> said for a simple distro that works in most all cases and looks
> "plain-Jane", but highly configurable. :0)
...

cutting edge, bleeding edge, whatever :-) I agree, though I am a
Mandrake fan.

> However, I found that in disabling 'acpi' on my laptop, I was able to
> use kdm to run XFce-4 without the instability problems of before, though
> I still have the KDE overhead I don't need. That's a start. I can also
> always go back to running 'startxfce4' at the shell prompt after booting
> up. I still have some choices until I know what I'm doing in
> reconfiguring the way X comes up. :0)
...

you'd better make sure your laptop supports APM before disabling ACPI.
APM is the older power management system, ACPI is the newer one (and
does some other stuff too). Many newer laptops (e.g. from a year ago)
have no APM support at all.

There are some laptop models where not enabling ACPI can lead to the CPU
fan never turning on which leads to the machine overheating and failing,
which is a Bad Thing(TM).
-- 
Jack Coates
Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture...