Running Debian 2.2 w/ kernel 2.4.1 and XFree86 4.0.2. I've had a lot of trouble getting KDE installed and running. I now have it limping along but everything isn't quite kosher.
First, XFree86 was loading into a default configuration rather than starting KDE. startx calls /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc, which is actually a link to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. That file simply calls /etc/X11/Xsession. Xsession is a maze of 'if' statements that should determine which windows manager to call. I commented out the final section, which exec's "$realstartup", and added a direct call to kdeinit. This works, in that I now get kde rather than a simple term when XFree86 starts, but it's an ugly hack at best. I'm running kdm (more on that in a minute), so the machine goes straight into XFree86. With this configuration, where SHOULD kde be started from? Should there be a /root/.xsession which calls kdeinit? The next problem is kdm. It displays a graphical representation of the machines users. However, in my case it also shows every directory immediately under the root: bin, dev, home, etc. as if they were users. I'm reasonably sure that this isn't correct behavior. I assume that kdm should be looking under the /home directory and listing all of the directories it finds there, and there's a misconfigured or missing configuration file which is causing it to look under / rather than /home. I found kdm.options and xdm-config under /etc/X11/kdm but neither seems to affect this. man kdm.options mentions nothing about users or the home directories and there doesn't seem to be a man page on xdm-config. Finally, once I get into kde, my fonts look like crap. Some web pages are all but unreadable. I've tried changing the fonts, which helps things a little bit but it's still quite horrible. Does this setup not support anti-aliasing or is there some problem with the fonts I have installed? I realize this isn't much info to go on, but I'm not sure what else to include. Thanks in advance for any assistance or hints on any of these problems.