The K Desktop Environment

Chapter 2. Configuring KDM

This chapter assumes that KDM is already up and running on your system, and that you simply want to change its behaviour in some way. If your problem is more serious, skip forward to later chapters.

When KDM starts up, it reads its configuration from the file kdmrc. Since KDM must run before any user is logged in, it is not associated with any particular user. Therefore, it is not possible to have a user-specific $HOME/share/config/kdmrc file; all users share the common version of kdmrc, located in $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc. It follows from this that the configuration of KDM can only be altered by those users that have write-access to $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc (normally restricted to system administrators logged in as "root").

You can view the kdmrc file currently in use on your system (located by default at $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc), and you can configure KDM by editing this file. Alternatively, you can use the graphical configuration tool provided by the KDE Control Centre (under Applications->System->Login Manager), which is described in the KControl help files.

The remainder of this chapter describes the contents of the kdmrc file. If you are happy using the graphical configuration tool, there's no need to read any further.

There are four sections in kdmrc:

2.1. KDM

The keys in this section are:

 StdFont
 FailFont
 GreetFont
 GreetString
 SessionTypes
 LogoArea
 LogoPixmap
 ShutdownButton
 Shutdown
 Restart
 ConsoleMode
 UserView
 Users
 NoUsers
 SortUsers
 GUIStyle

A short description of the keys:

*Font

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

GreetString

The title of the KDM login window.

SessionTypes

A comma-separated list of session arguments, usually used to select a particular window manager. Defaults to SessionTypes=kde,failsafe.

LogoArea

Controls what appears in the lower left-hand corner of the login window. Can be either KdmLogo (in which case the image specified by LogoPixMap is displayed) or KdmClock (in which case a clock is displayed).

LogoPixmap

Specifies the image to be displayed in the lower left-hand corner of the login window when LogoArea=KdmLogo.

ShutdownButton

ShutdownButton controls when the shutdown button is displayed and can be one of All, None, RootOnly and ConsoleOnly. The meaning of All and None is very clear. If you choose ConsoleOnly you can't do a remote shutdown. If you choose RootOnly you will be prompted to enter the root password before the shutdown will proceed.

Shutdown and Restart

The commands to run on system shutdown and restart, respectively. (Defaults: /sbin/halt and /sbin/reboot respectively.

ConsoleMode

The command string used by the Console Mode option of the "Shutdown" button. (Default: /sbin/init 3). This option is not available under BSD.

UserView

If this is set to "1", a graphical view of users will be displayed in the KDM window.

Users

A comma-separated list of usernames that will be displayed in the graphical user view. If UserView is set to "1" and the Users entry is missing, KDM will look for users in the password file /etc/passwd. The users displayed are those who have a real name beside their login name, a home directory and a default shell - the rest are skipped. KDM will look in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/pics/users/ for an icon for each user. If an icon named johndoe.png exists, KDM will use that for displaying user johndoe. If not, KDM will use default.png.

KDM is able to handle icons of different sizes, but the result looks messy. The solution to this is to use an application such as KDE's Pixie, (or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, (gimp) or John Bradley's XV,) to convert all your images to the same size. A size of 64x64 should give enough resolution, and matches the default icons provided. These two programs can also be used to convert images from various formats into png format.

NoUsers

A comma-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.