No window manager installed, what now?

[Martin Pitt]

Hi David!

On 2004-10-05  5:42 -0000, David Marsh wrote:
> I decided to share the /home partition between both distros, but now I'm
> wondering if that may a cause of my next problem as both distros use
> different user:group numbering, so I'm guessing that Ubuntu may
> therefore have difficulties reading files which (to its eyes?) don't
> actually belong to "me", when I login?

This is most probably the case. If you share /home, you need to have
the same user id and group id mappings in both of them. You can just
copy the relevant entries from /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group
from the old system to the new one (but be sure to put the users in
all relevant groups, like plugdev).

Probably gdm just gets confused because it cannot read your files.

> What's the magic I need to do when booting up in order to boot to a text
> console, not to X?

You can switch to the text consoles with Ctrl+Alt+Fn, but you can also
disable X on a per-runlevel basis. I. e. delete /etc/rc2.d/S99gdm to
have X (or, rather gdm, the GNOME display manager) not started by
default.

> I can still boot into my other distro, so I can chown my home directory
> from there if need be.

You should be able to login on a text console (Ctrl+Alt+F1), there you
can do 'sudo su' and have a root shell to do admin stuff with.

-- 
Martin Pitt                       http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer            http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer       http://www.debian.org
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