Gentoo loads to xsm screen, what next?

[bwd]

I can load to a zsm screen and do the termanil from there. I just emerged gnumeric and then gentoolkit and now I am emerging update --world. Would like to know what other programs to emerge? Do I need to fetch gmone or kde to get back grounds, firefox for the web? any ideas please.....

[budman7]

If you want a desktop environment, you have to emerge them.

If you do

emerge kde firefox
This will take 10-12 hours.

You will have a great Desktop environment and firefox.

Personally I would emerge xfce4 or icewm first so that you will be able to use X.
To get them to start you will have to create a .xinitrc file.

As root do
nano /home/username/.xinitrc
for xfce4, put this line in there

exec startxfce4

for icewm, put

icewm

[bwd]

so when I want to get a program I just add to this file? I emerged gnome, would I do the same as you have here. I also emerged kde, just make separtate files for them?

[Cabhan]

No.

If you are in commandline, you can enter a graphical environment by using the command "startx".

startx boots up the X Server, then executes any commands found in the ~/.xinitrc file.

So if you want to use KDE, you put "exec startkde" in that file. For Gnome, you put "exec gnome-session" and so on and so forth.

Gentoo provides guides on setting up a DE:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/kde-config.xml <-- KDE
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml <-- Gnome

[bwd]

I have for my XSESSION="Kde-<3.4.1> but when I do the startx I get fatal server error, server is already active for display 0, if this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again. what is that? I get this everytime and can you show me what that file would look like please.

And if you can give me the code to get in ~/.xinitrc
is nano /etc/ in front of that?

and how to stop Xserver

[budman7]

There are 2 different ways to get kde working. You will need to su into root for both of them.

For startx
nano /etc/inittab
make sure that the initdefaut is set to 3.
nano .xinitrc
Add this line

exec startkde


For booting straight into kde

nano /etc/rc.conf
Set your DISPLAYMANAGER to kdm
Set XSESSION to kde-<version number

Then do "rc-update add xdm default"

That will override your inittab, and put you directly into a gui login manager where you can choose to start any DE/WM you like, be it gnome, icewm or xfce4.