See the file README! It will tell you how to compile kdm. But normally
you don't need to compile kdm yourself, as it is part of the kdebase
package and compiled with all other stuff. It is then installed in
your $KDEDIR/bin directory.
NOTE: make install will overwrite your previous kdmrc.
During the installation a new version of the file Xsetup_0 is
installed. It espacially contains a line
to display some nice backgrounds (pictures and background colors).
Normally you find this file in the xdm config directory
/etc/X11/xdm/XSetup_0 for Redhat and
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/XSetup_0 for S.u.S.E.
If your KDEDIR is not /opt/kde you may have to change the path to kdmdesktop.
If you chose the PAM (which is normal with Red Hat 5 and 5.1) option,
then you should check /etc/pam.conf for the lines
# xdm authorization
xdm auth required pam_unix_auth.so
xdm auth required pam_unix_acct.so |
and insert them, if they aren't there.
Now it's time to test kdm. You should bring your system to a runlevel
that doesn't run xdm. To do so edit the file /etc/inittab
and look for the lines saying
# default runlevel
id:3:initdefault: |
The value after id: is the code of the default runlevel and very distribution
dependent, but always well explained. The runlevel with graphical login (xdm)
for the most common distributions are
5 for Red Hat 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, LST
4 for Slackware
3 for S.u.S.E. 4.x and 5.x
After this you can try to start kdm by typing the following command on
your favourite shell:
If you get a kdm login box and you are able to log in, things are great.
The main thing that can go wrong here, is that the runtime linker might
not find the shared Qt or KDE libraries. When everything works, you can
start to replace xdm by kdm. This is again distribution dependent.
for Redhat you edit /etc/inittab, look for the string xdm
and replace it with kdm (including all paths).
for S.u.S.E. you have to edit the file /sbin/init.d/xdm and to
add a first line
. /etc/rc.config
DISPLAYMANAGER=kdm
export DISPLAYMANAGER |
for other distributions it's rather the Redhat way, but I'm not too sure
about this.
For every distribution I know, you have to change the runlevel in the
/etc/inittab file (to 5 for Redhat, 3 for S.u.S.E. as mentioned above or in the
inittab file itself).
If you have a binary distribution of the KDE libraries, make sure kdm is
installed where the libraries believe kde is installed. This is again
normally /opt/kde/bin.
If you dont like changing inittab, you might instead rename xdm to xdm.bak
and make xdm a symlink to kdm.
Kdm will read the general display manager settings from the xdm configuration
files and the kdm specific ones from the file
$KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc. Kdmdesktop will also read kdmrc.