After testing the beta of CentOS 5, i was a little surprised to notice that the display manager part of the prefdm file in /etc/X11 was exactly like in CentOS 4 / RHEL4 and previous versions including RH9.
it reads like this (added line numbers for reference):
14 # Run preferred X display manager 15 preferred= 16 if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then 17 . /etc/sysconfig/desktop 18 if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GNOME ]; then 19 preferred=gdm 20 elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDE ]; then 21 preferred=kdm 22 elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = XDM ]; then 23 preferred=xdm 24 fi 25 fi
Line 17 is no functional command i know of, therefor the choice of which displaymanager (login-screen) to use is decided by the fallback lines later in the script (that starts with gdm). If you're ok with gdm, than there's no need for this to change.
Still, it would seem that something is missing there. My best guess for what was supposed to be there:
# Run preferred X display manager preferred= if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then DISPLAYMANAGER=$(cat /etc/sysconfig/desktop | grep DESKTOP | cut -d '"' -f2) if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GNOME ]; then preferred=gdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDE ]; then preferred=kdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = XDM ]; then preferred=xdm fi fi
This would make kdm your display manager when using kde as default desktop and gdm when using gnome. Although the grep part is not necessary, i added it in case someone decides to add lines to the desktop file someday...
I've come across one forum post in which someone suggested to add the line DISPLAYMANAGER="KDM" to the desktop file in order to achieve the same result. For this to work the prefdm file should be altered like this:
# Run preferred X display manager preferred= if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then if [ -n "$(cat /etc/sysconfig/desktop | grep DISPLAYMANAGER | cut -d '"' -f2)" ];then DISPLAYMANAGER=$(cat /etc/sysconfig/desktop | grep DISPLAYMANAGER | cut -d '"' -f2) if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GDM ]; then preferred=gdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDM ]; then preferred=kdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = XDM ]; then preferred=xdm fi else DISPLAYMANAGER=$(cat /etc/sysconfig/desktop | grep DESKTOP | cut -d '"' -f2) if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GNOME ]; then preferred=gdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDE ]; then preferred=kdm elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = XDM ]; then preferred=xdm fi fi fi
It all seems basic scripting to me so i wonder if no-one simply never noticed or never cared to finish this one.
Rody