The K Desktop Environment

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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.

If you have xdm installed, you probably dont need to modify your Xsession script, but take a look at the files in the "samples" directory anyway -- they show how to use kdm's session argument feature.

The kdm-specific option are configured by editing the file "$KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc". There are two 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 the ouput from xfontsel.

GreetString

is the title of the kdm login window.

SessionTypes

is a ``;'' separated list of session arguments. It defaults to SessionTypes=kde;failsafe. For more info on session arguments, see the xdm file Xsession.

[Insert example here!]
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.

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 wont 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.

3.2 KDMDESKTOP

This section controls the background. The keys are:

BackgroundPicture
BackgroundColor
BackgroundPictureTile
BackgroundPictureCenter
FancyBackground

The first is the path to an image, the second a named color and the rest are booleans (0 or 1). Note that FancyBackground=1 looks nice, but is very slow.

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