Arch Linux

nilsHaus

Member

Registered: 2007-06-22

Posts: 69

xdm login issues

I'm trying to stay away from KDE and Gnome as much as I can, just for kicks and also b/c its a pretty old machine, So I wanted to use XDM as a login manager. Installed via pacman--It does nothing. I'll change the visuals later but if I try to login as anything, I will get a flash of "login sucessful" and then the login manager will respawn.
When I go down to runlevel 3 and manually run it as root, I can exit it by ctrl+alt+backspace. However, If I boot in runlevel 5, the only thing that I can do is Ctrl+alt+F1-5 and return to a virtual console.

Am I missing an .Xsession file or something?

kett

Member

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 104

Re: xdm login issues

Whats your ~/.xinitrc fine look like? You need to uncomment a DE or WM, so that the login knows to start something.

nilsHaus

Member

Registered: 2007-06-22

Posts: 69

Re: xdm login issues

I use openbox so most everything I use is autostart.sh

#!/bin/sh

# start some nice programs

xcompmgr &
exec openbox-session

ScriptDevil

Member

From: In Front of My PC

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 253

Re: xdm login issues

of course even in run level three, alt+f7 will take you back to the X screen... Not that it helps your problem

---

Be yourself, because you are all that you can be

nilsHaus

Member

Registered: 2007-06-22

Posts: 69

Re: xdm login issues

you mean ctrl+alt+F1? yeah, that's what I do when it gets trapped. I switched over to gdm (grrrrrr) but would still like to know how xdm works.

kett

Member

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 104

Re: xdm login issues

I assume you can login in the console and run startx, and it works. I've never used openbox, but if startx works, then I would guess that the autostart.sh script isn't getting executed.

Have you tried logging into the console, and then running the autostart.sh script to see if any errors occur?

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: xdm login issues

xdm needs .Xsession. This can be a copy of, or even a symlink to, .xinitrc.

Correction: .xsession.

nilsHaus

Member

Registered: 2007-06-22

Posts: 69

Re: xdm login issues

got that. .xsession is indeed a copy of .xinitrc.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: xdm login issues

btw, do you know about slim? It's more-or-less as light as xdm, no Knome deps, and much easier to prettify IMO.

nilsHaus

Member

Registered: 2007-06-22

Posts: 69

Re: xdm login issues

I do know about it. If xdm is that hopeless/uninteresting, 'll give it a try.