KDE not starting. Cannot start kdeinit

[Jan Grant]

On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Danny Pansters wrote:

> IIRC exec used to be needed for some reason, but that's been a while, merely 
> startkde (which is just a shell script) will do.

The reasoning is in the man page for startx(1):

[[
The .xinitrc is typically a shell script which starts many clients 
according to the user's preference.  When this shell script exits, 
startx kills the server and performs any other session shutdown needed. 
Most of the clients started by .xinitrc should be run in the back- 
ground.  The last client should run in the foreground; when it exits, 
the session will exit.  People often choose a session manager, window
manager, or xterm as the ''magic'' client.
]]

Since the session stops when the .xinitrc process dies, you can either 
launch startkde from within the shell script (in which case the .xinitrc 
script waits until startkde exits, then exits), or you can use "exec 
startkde" to replace the .xinitrc process with the startkde one. In 
either case the only difference is that leaving out the exec means 
you've got one additional shell process hanging around until you quit X.

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44 (0)117 9287088 (with luck)   http://ioctl.org/jan/
"I like oranges more than apples!?" - that's like comparing apples and oranges!