Well, I got back from lunch and the first thing I was hit with was a request to change the desktop on a colleague’s laptop from fvwm to Gnome.
Apparently he did a base install of SuSE 10.2 last night and of course Gnome wasn’t installed. When he installed Gnome this morning via Yast, the laptop still booted to fvwm. Not being overly familiar with SuSE 10.2, I hunted around a bit, poking through the X configuration files before I came across a reference to /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager.
Sure enough, when I looked in the above file, the DISPLAYMANAGER variable is set at the top of the file. By default it is blank, but you can set it to xdm (the default), gdm, or kdm – or indeed any other display manager you have installed.