Meanwhile, I mainly want to use the machine for C++ and possibly Perl, ideally with some kind of user-friendly IDE.

I'm sure plenty of people on ALUG have their personal favourite....

A couple of things. During install I was asked about partitions. I chose one at random, would that make a difference (there is no other OS on the machine now)?

Basically, probably not. If you were using it as your own mega-whizz computer, then there are things that you could do. e.g have a separate partition for /home, that way if you need to reinstall, or install a different distro, you could keep all your files in /home without having to back them up separately.

Secondly, I set it to go straight to X when I login, so Gnome comes up straight awawy. How could I get out of that? (Ctrl-alt-bckspc?)

Erk, this is where it gets a little tricky... If you have a graphical login screen, you probably have GDM installed, you could configure GDM as root using GDMconfigurator. You could then select Window Maker or whatever as the default window manager to start on login.

What it sounds like, though, is that you have the Mandrake thing of logging you in immediately when you boot up. (I never liked that feature). To change that, I would have to hand that over to the rest of ALUG... Mandrake and Redhat use very custom scripts, that are a little tricky to figure out when you're not sitting at that computer.

Ricardo

Here's 2 screenshots of WindowMaker, btw. http://www.rscampos.net/web_snapshots/wm_tech_creat.jpg http://www.rscampos.net/web_snapshots/WM_blue_Mind.jpg