On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Carlson, Clarence R., D.O. wrote:

>   As an experiment I went ahead and loaded kde via pkg_add, off of the CD. I
> am finding it's not as easy as just "firing up the desktop". For one thing,
> I am in xterm, so I already have a windows manager running and kwm won't
> start. That doesn't appear to be the only problem. I picked kde because "it
> was there". (And I've used it with linux)

The usual way is to have "exec <session-manager>" as the last thing in
your ~/.xsession file (in this case, "exec kde"). Then it's started
automatically when you log in under xdm. The analog with "startx",
rather than "xdm", is ~/.xinitrc.

You didn't ask for opinions on window managers, but you're going to
get them anyway. :-)  If KDE is too slow on the 575, try "afterstep".
I've used Afterstep solo on the 840AV, a lot, and nowadays I run it
under gnome (but not on the Mac). For the slowest machines, "wmx" is
unbeatable -- you get a configurable menu, unlimited virtual desktops,
hot-keys (Alt-TAB and ALT-arrow switch windows and desktops,
respectively), and pretty borders, all in ~100Kb. "icewm" is another
good-looking, light-weight window manager, but it just doesn't do it
for me. <shrug>


Frederick