How do I start KDE after X crash?

Question

X just crashed on my Ubuntu 10.04 computer. GNOME is working, but I would like to use KDE instead. Running

startx

just starts GNOME, loging out through GNOME brings me back to the shell. I tried

sudo kdm

but it doesn't do anything.

Answer 1

Don't run startx directly, instead use the startup scripts:

sudo start kdm

For Gnome, you would use:

sudo start gdm

For reference, equivalents of these command would be:

sudo service start kdm
sudo /etc/init.d/kdm start

(to be exact, the first is actually a wrapper which calls the new Upstart script)