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I don't normally use gdm. But it started up after something went wrong with X setup in a text mode install of fairfax on a laptop. I had said I didn't want X to start on boot but it did. (already bugzilla'd.) I wanted to get rid of it. And I can't see how to stop it short of rpm -e or telinit 3. I expected an /etc/init.d/gdm file I could start, restart and stop. I can't figure out how to stop it starting every time I reboot other than removing the entire package now. Which means I can't test it properly then :) I don't think this is an 'enhancement'. I think it's more severe than that. If X or gdm is broken, I have no way to stop gdm: tksysv doesn't know about it, for example. Well, short of rpm -e which is not always what I want.
Agree this would be nice, nontrivial though. I'll think about how to do it and also try to convince George to do it for me. ;-)
telinit 3 is the normal way to kill a <foo>dm gone bad.
right but is there a reason why most services have scripts so you can add/remove them from runlevels but gdm doesn't?
Because the display manager is implicitly tied to runlevel 5. Also, it wouldn't respawn right if it was an init service (and there's a race for which console it starts on if you do it that way.)
If Bill says it won't work then I believe him, I don't know too much about these things.