hello. i have KDE working with XDM/KDM activating upon boot to handle (automatic) logging into the system. yesterday (i've only had the system up for a couple of days) i noticed that the prompts in bash (through Konsole) were messed up. my current prompt is 'bash-2.05b$'. however, i then noticed that if i log off, tell KDM to go to the console, log in, and then type 'startx', KDE starts just fine and the Konsole/bash prompt is what I want: 'user@host directory$'. my question isn't about how to set the prompt up the way i want; i've done that before. what i want to know is why this particular thing is occuring. this means to me that some init script is running when i do 'startx' that isn't running when XDM starts with the system, or visa versa. what is the offending script?

Thanks for the help,

~ Justin

It's in kdm or xdm or the script that starts your chosen display manager(dm), be it kdm, xdm or something else. You can start X w/o starting kdm or xdm but X must start first for kdm or xdm to run. It must be something in the init scripts that starts your dm that is causing the change. At least that's the first place I would look.

and what are the names of those scripts? are they in /etc/X11 or somewhere else?

One place to look is in ~/.bashrc. You can set your prompt by changing the PSI variable like below. Just put this in your ~/.bashrc.
This should give you a prompt that looks like this: [10:03:45][me:~/bin]$