[CLUE-Tech] Preventing KDE from taking over X sessions

[Matt Gushee]

I will not bash KDE ... I will not bash KDE ... I will not bash KDE ...

Hi, all--

Well, it's happened again. I wanted to run a program that depends on
KDE--actually I think it just needed kdelibs, but just in case, I
installed kdebase (which includes the desktop). I do *not* want a KDE
desktop, just the one app, but after installing KDE, I found that
whenever I started an X session, it would try to be a KDE session (but
that didn't even work because something was missing). So I:

  * Examined my .xinitrc, .xsession, .Xclients files, and so on.
    No reference to kwm or k-anything. Same for the system-wide xinitrc.

  * Found (I think) all kde-related dotfiles and dot-directories
    (.kde*, .kwm*, .ksm*, .mcop*, .dcop*, ....) in my home directory and
    deleted them. No change.

  * Deleted all kde-related /tmp/ subdirectories that I owned (actually,
    I later found I had missed one--maybe that was the problem). No
    change. 
  
  * Deleted /etc/X11/sessions/kde (or whatever it was called). No
    change.

  * Uninstalled the kdebase package. Finally back to normal.

So what's the secret? What kind of black magic does KDE use to take
control, and what's the counterspell? I looked at the KDE FAQ and a few
other docs, and couldn't find any reference to this problem ...  maybe
the KDE team doesn't think it's a problem ;-) ... but this has happened
to me at least 2 or 3 times over a span of 5 years, so I don't think
it's a fluke. Anybody got a CLUE about this?

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Haven Rock Press            Horses bear manure through
Englewood, Colorado, USA        its fields;   
books at havenrock.com         When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)