On 2013/04/24 12:02, Miranda Hawarden-Ogata wrote:
I recently switched our workstations from gdm to kdm, because I was receiving some complaints with gdm about having to set the desktop halfway through the login (versus being able to set it from the start of the login process), as well as having the mile long list of previous logins (which, by the way, if anyone knows how to turn that off, lemme know, please!).
After switching the window manager to kdm, we started having problems with our vncserver sessions. Every single session was kde, without regard for the contents of the xstartup file for that particular user. I have users that want gnome and others that want kde, and some project accounts that use some other custom stuff, so obviously this was a problem.
The only "configuration" I did after yum group-installing KDE-Desktop was to set up the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file to contain: DESKTOP="KDE" DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"
so I am not sure what is up with kdm to be causing this. I tried looking online but only found some ancient debian/ubuntu questions that are mostly unanswered or resolved in ways that won't work for us (hard coding something in xinitrc, for example).
So, does anyone have any ideas as to what is going on and what I can do to resolve it? I am currently in the process of rolling back the workstations to the gdm configuration as a "fix", but if possible I'd really like to be able to actually sort out what is going on. Our systems are not heavily customized, being "software development workstation" installs with a few extra group installs (including the centos base tigervnc-server package) and a handful of third-party rpmforge packages installed, and kdm seems to work properly on the console (allowing selection of other desktops, etc), it's only with the ~/.vnc/xstartup that we are having issues.
Thanks! Miranda
For anyone in the future trying to figure this out, thought I'd post. Turned out that the "default" xstartup that I thought was explicitly calling gnome was not doing so, and was calling the system default desktop instead. Once I explicitly called gnome via a gnome-session script call in xstartup, the problem was resolved.
Although a great many of the online instructions for setting gnome as your vnc desktop tell you to unset some variables and then call startx, all that does is call the system default desktop, which is fine and dandy if you're running gdm as your manager, but completely worthless if you are running kdm. You need to explicitly call gnome-session instead of startx, and you can also dump everything else in the "default" file as it is not necessary. A functional xstartup can be as barren as:
(gnome) #!/bin/sh gnome-session &
(kde) #!/bin/sh startkde &
Hope this helps someone in the future :D
Thanks! Miranda