Adding Environments / Sessions to the LOGIN banner

[tony j. podrasky]

Hello Everyone;

I've done a lot of work on my host and have LESSTIF working at an acceptable level.

How can I add "mwm" to the list of sessions (like lxdm / kde / gnome) that are available at login?

Any ideas will be appreciated.

regards,

tony.podrasky

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

You did not identify your Linux distribution, or the X Display Manager you're using.

The X Display Manager is the process that starts the actual X server on the console and displays the login window. It is usually named *dm, e.g. kdm, gdm, wdm, xdm or whatever.

For example, Debian 6.0 with kdm as X Display Manager builds the list of sessions automatically based on which window/session managers are installed on the system. The list of possible sessions is stored as .desktop files in the /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/sessions directory. "mwm.desktop" exists, so MWM would automatically appear as one of the session options if a "mwm" binary can be found in the PATH by the kdm process.

Other display managers may have a very different mechanism.

[tony j. podrasky]

Hello Matti;

I'm sorry that I left out so much information.

The platform is Fedora 16.

Even without my supplying any useful information, your explanation was sufficient to fix the problem:

I did a <locate .desktop>, found where they were at, copied one to mwm.desktop, edited it, rebooted and it worked.

The only thing that it didn't do was source the .xinitrc file - but it did read the .mwmrc.

Thanks for all your help. After butchering files all over the place, the fix was simple :-)

Hope you have a great weekend.

regards,

tony.podrasky

[Matti_Kurkela]

Just to satisfy my curiosity: where were those session-startup .desktop files located on a Fedora 16 system?

[tony j. podrasky]

Hello Matti;

Here's the directory and what is in it.

Again, thanx for the help.

regards,

tony.podrasky

tonyp% pwd
/usr/share/xsessions

tonyp% ls -la
total 48
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root         4096 Jul 20 14:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 351 root     root        12288 Jul  1 14:43 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         4701 Oct 26  2011 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         5143 Oct 31  2011 kde-plasma-safe.desktop
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         3400 Oct 31  2011 kde-plasma.desktop
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          458 Jul 11  2011 lxde.desktop
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          177 Jul 20 07:58 mwm.desktop
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          214 Oct 10  2011 openbox.desktop
tonyp%