xdm - installing and customizing

Links: Linux Journal 1999(!)

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I strongly agree with this post's comment that kdm and gdm are lib-laden and overall bloated. To simply login, we just might want a different background photo than the the standard x box, but that's all the customization I need. In fact, I prefer runlevel 3 at startup, but if I'm helping someone with Linux that prefers a window-esque GUI right from the start, then it's got to be runlevel 5.

install - file changes

One can just download xdm with pacman. There are only two important file changes: 1) xdm (and all display managers) read .xsession instead of .xinitrc. 2) changing to runlevel 5 means altering /etc/inittab I organized a working xdm on a friends system with the following...

# nano /etc/inittab
x:5:respawn:/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon -config /etc/X11/xdm/archlinux/xdm-config

$ cp .xinitrc .xsession

customizing

One of the best instructions on this remains from 1999 (link at top). XDM goes way back.