LXDM
From LXDM - LXDE Display Manager:
- LXDM is the lightweight display manager aimed to replace gdm in LXDE distros. The UI is implemented with GTK+. It is stil in early stages of development.
Contents
1 Installation
Install the lxdm package which is available in the official repositories.
To make the graphical login the default method of logging into the system, edit your /etc/inittab file (recommended) by adding or uncommenting this line:
x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/lxdm >& /dev/null
Alternatively you can add lxdm to your list of daemons in /etc/rc.conf. These procedures are detailed on the Display Manager page.
2 Configuration
The configuration files for LXDM are all located in /etc/lxdm. The main configuration file is lxdm.conf, and is well documented in its comments. Another file, Xsession, is the systemwide x session configuration file and should generally not be edited. The other files in this folder are all bash scripts, which are run when certain events happen in LXDM.
These are:
- LoginReady: Is executed with root priviledges when LXDM is ready to show the login window.
- PreLogin: Is run as root before logging a user in.
- PostLogin: Is run as the logged-in user right after they have logged in.
- PostLogout: Is run as the logged-in user right after they have logged out.
- PreReboot: Is run as root before rebooting with LXDM.
- PreShutdown: Is run as root before poweroff with LXDM.
2.1 Autologin
If you want to log in to one account automatically, without providing a password, find the line in /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf that looks like this:
#autologin=username
Uncomment it, then substitute your own username instead of "username".
This will cause LXDM to automatically log you in to the specified account when it first starts up. However, if you were to log out of that account, you would have to enter its password to log back into it; and if the password was empty, you would find yourself unable to log into the account. To make it so that you can manually log into the account without entering a password, first delete the password:
$ passwd -d USERNAME
Then, edit the PAM file for LXDM, which is /etc/pam.d/lxdm. The files in this directory describe how users are authenticated by the various installed programs that need to do some sort of authentication. Change the line that says
auth required pam_unix.so
to this:
auth required pam_unix.so nullok
This will tell the pam_unix authentication module that blank passwords are to be accepted. After making this change, LXDM will let you log into accounts with blank passwords.
2.2 Default session
If you want to change the default session or DE for LXDM to run instead of the default LXDE. Edit /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf and change the line:
session=/usr/bin/startlxde
to whatever session or DE you want as default. Example to use Xfce as your default:
session=/usr/bin/startxfce4
This is useful if your theme has no visible session selection box or you have trouble using autologin.
2.3 Expected Logout Behavior
What might be slightly surprising with LXDM is that, by default, it does not clear the last user's desktop background or kill the user's processes when that user logs out. If you desire this behaviour, you can edit /etc/lxdm/PostLogout like this:
#!/bin/sh # Kills all your processes when you log out. killall --user $USER -TERM # Set's the desktop background to solid black. Useful if you have multiple monitors. xsetroot -solid black
2.4 Unlocking Keyrings upon Login
When using a key manager such as gnome-keyring to manage passwords for ssh keys, /etc/pam.d/lxdm should be adjusted to allow users to unlock keyrings upon login if desired. The following is a functional configuration:
#%PAM-1.0 auth requisite pam_nologin.so auth required pam_env.so auth required pam_unix.so auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so account required pam_unix.so session required pam_limits.so session required pam_unix.so session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start password required pam_unix.so
2.5 Adding alternative X sessions with .desktop files
If additional Window Managers, Desktop Environments or X sessions are required and are not provided by their respective installation, you'll need to add custom .desktop files to /usr/share/xsessions/ for LXDM to recognise them.
Example:
[Desktop Entry] Name=Subtle Exec=subtle LXDM will launch this .desktop file using the following command: ck-launch-session subtle (if /etc/Xsessions is unaltered.)
2.6 Adding Keyboard to the display
First edit /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf and change
keyboard=0
to
keyboard=1
this abilitate the keyboard selection in the display manager, but by default is blank then you need to...