how do you turn off xdm?

[Kevin Crowston]

I'm using X on my Mac.  I wanted to have the system just always run X,
so I tried using xdm.  I put the xdm startup in inittab so that when
the machine went to multi-user mode, I could login with the xdm login
window.  In general, this was pretty nice.

My problem comes when I want to turn the machine off.  You can't run
shutdown, because init can only be run from the console.  If you just
kill the X server, then you're also stuck, because there's no getty
process running on the console and you can't log in.  If you remote log
in and do init q to restart the getty, it prints the herald and "Login:"
and then seems to die.  After doing this ten or fifteen times, init gives
up and prints a message saying that the getty had to be restarted too
often.  

For the time being I've gone back to starting X from my .login, but
even here I occasionally get the console process stuck.  I haven't been
able to figure out how to unstick it, so I usually end up rebooting the
machine.  

So, first, why does the getty get stuck and how can I unstick it?  And,
second, has anyone been able to use xdm?  And if so, how?

Kevin Crowston