automatic behaviour of Debian

[geek.arnuld]

i installed Debian Lenny, using netinst CD. i installed "xdm" and rebooted and i was greeted with xdm login-screen. i don't get it and felt frustrated at this :-\ why Debian added xdm to default runlevel when i did not tell it anything about what to do with xdm? same happened with ALSA. it feels like Fedora, automatic happenings of things. i used Gentoo once and it did not do things like these e.g. on CRUX, my current system, you have to add "xdm alsa" to "/etc/rc.conf", otherwise both will not start. i heard Debian is for experiences users but now i think it is for newbies who do need hand-holding ..

so why Debian adds thing automatically especially when i don't see any word like "hand-holding" or "user-friendly" in its philosophy

in the end i liked 2 aspects of Debian, DFSG + Extreme Stability

BTW, from where i can remove xdm from default runlevel ?

[Zelmo]

I'm guessing that the package managers' stance is that if you install a package, you want to use it, so they configure it to be enabled when it's installed. Granted, that's not always the case (as you've indicated), but I would venture that it's accurate most of the time.

That said, I thought that when installing a desktop manager in Debian, you used to get a dialog asking what DM to use, which gave you the option of using none. That doesn't appear to be the case now, so you'll just need to pull the symlink from your default /etc/rc.X runlevel that points to /etc/init.d/xdm. You can either do that manually as root, or fire up your favorite SysV or initV editor and disable it from there.

[geek.arnuld]

I'm guessing that the package managers' stance is that if you install a package, you want to use it, so they configure it to be enabled when it's installed. Granted, that's not always the case (as you've indicated), but I would venture that it's accurate most of the time.

i agree

That said, I thought that when installing a desktop manager in Debian, you used to get a dialog asking what DM to use, which gave you the option of using none. That doesn't appear to be the case now, so you'll just need to pull the symlink from your default /etc/rc.X runlevel that points to /etc/init.d/xdm. You can either do that manually as root, or fire up your favorite SysV or initV editor and disable it from there.

CRUX: add/remove "your DM" from "/etc/rc.conf"
Gentoo: rc-update add/delete "your DM"

i think that is much simple, but that is just IMVHO