Configuring KDM and GDM
The First Display
Both KDE and GNOME have display
managers.We’ll look at the features
offered by KDM and GDM,and we’ll
examine how to configure a display
manager for your Linux system.
On many systems, the display or
login manager is the first GUI
program the user sees. Most
major distributions automatically launch
the X Window system. Users type their
names and passwords to log on and
select an environment. They can often
select other options, such as an option
for shutting down or rebooting.
KDM, by the KDE project, and its
Gnome counterpart GDM are the most
popular display managers, but there are
a number of alternatives, such as the
legacy XDM or the small-footprint WDM
managers. The login manager has no
influence on the desktop the machine
runs; even the biggest KDE fans could
still use GDM to log on to the system and
launch their favorite environment. The
only disadvantage is that installing GDM
puts a lot of Gnome libraries
on your hard disk, taking up
valuable storage space. This
article explains how to change
the display manager on
Fedora Core 2, Suse Linux 9.1,
and Mandrake Linux 10.0,
and how you can add window
managers to the drop-down
list.
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