Replacing GDM with SLiM

[weaner]

Hi All,
I am loving the new XFCE version of Mint, it is gloriously fast and shiny except for just one thing. And that's the horrible bloat that is the GDM display manager.
I've now installed SLiM and hoped it would be a painless shift from one to the other but have run into a large problem; namely whenever I boot into Mint and use SLiM as the display manager it garbles the display. If I quickly flick between virtual consoles I can just about make out the error message "Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode", of which I can find nothing of relevance on google.
The odd thing is that if I start with GDM as the default display manager, then switch to another virtual console once it has loaded; I can log in and run slim from there and it will work perfectly.
When I boot the system with no display manager the display will still become garbled and unreadable.

Does anyone have ideas where I am going wrong?

[dawgdoc]

@ weaner

I did a search on this forum for "low graphics mode" and perused about 2 dozen of the most recent entries. I didn't read a post where the display manager caused this error, but all posts with this message seemed to be resolved in one of two ways.

1) Uninstalling and re-installing a proprietary video driver, or
2) Deleting the xorg.conf file,

Code: Select all

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

if you are using open source drivers it will be recreated if needed, as a rule xorg.conf is not needed in Mint 8 (don't know if this is true for XFCE)

[weaner]

Thanks, there is a good chance I looked at all those threads too.
There is no xorg.conf with this distro to delete so that rules out option 2.
And the X driver (i915) works fine with GDM.
I'm starting to think that this is a daemon/service issue. I think GDM is pulling in some services when it starts or some services need GDM to start before they start.
I'll poke around in /etc/init and see what I can find.

**EDIT** I think /etc/init/failsafe-x.conf could be the guilty party here.

# failsafe-x - Recovery options if gdm fails to start
#
# If gdm exits non-zero, something is wrong - launch the bulletproof-X
# interface

description "Recovery options if gdm fails to start"

start on stopped gdm EXIT_STATUS=[!0]
stop on runlevel [06]

task

exec /etc/gdm/failsafeXServer

Now to start tinkering again