KDE Display Manager (KDM): Configuring kdm
Description: KDM
Keywords: KDM installation introduction

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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.

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`.

### 3.2 KDMDESKTOP

This section controls the background. The keys are:

> `

>      BackgroundPicture BackgroundColor1 BackgroundColor2 BackgroundPictureMode

> `

A short description of the keys:

BackgroundPicture

  is the path to an image.

BackgroundColor[1|2]

  are named colors for solid and blended background.

BackgroundPictureMode

  can contain one of the following options:

  `None | Tile | Scale | Center | TopLeft | TopRight | BottomLeft | BottomRight | Fancy`

  Note that `Fancy` background looks nice, but is very slow.

### 3.3 Locale

This section should only contain one single entry.

Language

  is indicating the language to use for kdm. It can be changed independently from KDE. The values are the same as usual en/de/fr/da etc.

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