The K Desktop Environment

Chapter 3. Configuring kdm

There is a graphical tool for configuring kdm. You will find it under the menu K/Settings/Applications/. With this tool you can configure the kdm specific options (stored in kdmrc), but kdm still has to be set up properly just like xdm, so please read on.

The kdm-specific option are configured by editing the file "$KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc". There are three sections in kdmrc:

3.1. KDM

The keys in this section are
 StdFont
 FailFont
 GreetFont
 GreetString
 SessionTypes
 LogoPixmap
 ShutdownButton
 Shutdown
 Restart
 UserView
 Users
 NoUsers
 SortUsers
 GUIStyle

A short description of the keys:

*Font

is a fontsstring formatted like this: Courier,12,5,iso-8859-1,50,0.

GreetString

is the title of the kdm login window.

SessionTypes

is a ``;'' separated list of session arguments. It defaults to SessionTypes=kde;failsafe. Above example uses additionally the fvwm2 and fvwm95 windowmanagers.

LogoPixmap

Change this, if you dont like the logo.

ShutdownButton, Shutdown and Restart

ShutdownButton controls when the shutdown button is displayed and can be one of All, None, RootOnly and ConsoleOnly. Shutdown and Restart are the commands to run on shutdown/restart. They default to /sbin/halt and /sbin/reboot. The meaning of All and None is very clear, if you choose ConsoleOnly you can't do a remote shutdown.

UserView

If this is set to ``1'', a graphical view of users will be displayed in the kdm window.

Users

is a ``;'' separated list of usernames that will be displayed in the graphical user view. If UserView is 1 and the Users entry is missing, kdm will look for users in the password file. The users displayed are those who have a real name beside their loginname, a home directory and a default shell - the rest is skipped. Kdm will look in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/pics/users/ for an icon for each user. If there exists an icon named johndoe.xpm, kdm will use that for displaying user johndoe, if not kdm will use default.xpm. So if you have a little picture of every user on your system, just place them in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/pics/users/ and have great fun logging in with kdm ;-) NOTE: Kdm is able to handle icons with different sizes, but it might not be too pretty to use both very small and very large icons.

NoUsers

is a ``;'' separated list of usernames that won't be displayed. Use it to filter ``pseudo-users'' like sync and shutdown from the user view.

SortUsers

If set to ``0'', the list of users are displayed in the order it was read. The default is to display users in sorted order.

GUIStyle

can be either Motif or Windows.