Mandrake ??

[peter]

I don't know about the rest of it, you'd have to teach me that (NIS, and 
friends)

But I recently went through something similar WRT going directly from 
gdm to my desktop... the answer to that was in my ~/.xinitrc file

(man xinitrc)

I imagine KDM is similar, but I don't know... I'm curious, could you let 
me know what happens?

-- 
"Did you ever have a dream Neo, that you were so sure was real
that when you awoke how could you tell the difference between
the dream world and the real world?"
	-- Morpheus, "The Matrix"