Login Managers and Greeting Screens

[GeeFN]

I'm using SUSE 7.3 with with KDE 3.0.5 and Xfree 4.11.0 and, after replacing my graphics card (an NVidia TNT2) with an indentical model (the original died), I lost the pretty kde login screen, the one with the nice icons for allowed users, and now have an plain, ugly, grey, text-based login screen?

The kde login manager does not appear to work properly when applying changes (a known bug apparenty) and I have been through all the things I can think of. Strangely, the configuration in kdmrc appears to be identical to another machine where the nice, icon-based login screen does appear correctly. Here is the part that I believe matters.

[X-*-Greeter]
AntiAliasing=true
DefaultUser=adabas
EchoMode=NoEcho
FailFont=Nimbus Sans l,12,-1,5,74,0,0,0,0,0
FocusPasswd=false
GUIStyle=Default
GreetFont=Nimbus Sans l,20,-1,5,48,0,0,0,0,0
GreetString=SuSE Linux 7.3.99 (%h)
GreeterPosFixed=false
GreeterPosX=100
GreeterPosY=100
HiddenUsers=nobody,root,
Language=en_US
LogoArea=Logo
LogoPixmap=
MaxShowUID=65535
MinShowUID=100
PreselectUser=Previous
SelectedUsers=gee,guest,
SessionTypes=kde,windowmaker,fvwm2,mwm,twm,failsaf e,
ShowUsers=Selected
SortUsers=true
StdFont=Nimbus Sans l,12,-1,5,48,0,0,0,0,0

Question is: which file determines what login/greeting screen is displayed and how can I force it to be read...

Thanks in advance for any pointers

[Dolda2000]

Plain, ugly, grey, text-based? Doesn't sound like X at all to me. It seems rather more likely that it is your X server that refuses to run. Can you get it (the X server) started at all?

[GeeFN]

Sorry, my mistake - it always looks so clear and concise when you type it in, doesn't it? X starts, no problems and the system itself performs faultlessly otherwise. The grey screen I refer to is the GUI login/Welcome screen, where you fill in the users name/password by typing them in as text in order to fire up a KDE session - and, indeed this starts as normal. It is this initial "Login/Welcome" screen (I use the term "Welcome" only because this is the term used in the docu/man pages) that is the problem for me in that before I had to replace the dead graphics card (for an indentical nVidia TNT2 - 32MB), I had the nice KDE login screen with the users shown as ICONS and the SUSE background wallpaper. Whatever I seem to do now to the kdmrc file, either by means of YAST or directly in the file itself appears to make no difference.

Don't get me wrong, this is about as far from a show stopper as you can get. But it would be nice to know how to fix it and so far a solution has eluded me...

Thanks

Gee

[Dolda2000]

If it's grey, then it sounds more like xdm than kdm. I don't know why it would have changed, but it might have somehow.
When it's displayed, go to a text mode terminal, log in and run "ps -A | grep .dm" to see what display manager is running.

[GeeFN]

That was it! I did a find -exec grep of /etc and found that an instance of xdm in the rc.config. Perhaps it was always so and only became a problem after the graphic controller went kaboom, though I find this hard to believe. Whatever, I changed the setting to kdm, which was the setting in the SUSE 8.0 clients and the pretty-little welcome screen has been reincarnated. I think my confusion can be laid at the door of so much of /etc being change between SUSE 7.3 and 8.0 that I was not looking in the right places.

Thanks anyway for pointing me in the right direction and keep up the good work.

Gee

[Dolda2000]

If I am to make an educated guess at why it changed to xdm, I'd say that the init scripts tried to fall back on xdm when kdm failed (since your X config might have been broken at least a while).

[Allblack]

I have similar problems. It does not work at all. I just get the defailt username-password boxes. KDM or XDM does not work. What could be the problem?
Here's kdmrc file

Desktop0]
BackgroundMode=VerticalGradient
BlendBalance=100
BlendMode=NoBlending
ChangeInterval=60
Color1=138,148,198
Color2=104,112,150
CurrentWallpaper=0
LastChange=0
MinOptimizationDepth=1
MultiWallpaperMode=NoMulti
Pattern=
Program=
ReverseBlending=false
UseSHM=false
Wallpaper=/usr/share/backgrounds/images/default.png
WallpaperList=
WallpaperMode=Centred

[General]
PidFile=/var/run/kdm.pid
Xservers=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xservers

[Shutdown]
HaltCmd=/sbin/poweroff
LiloCmd=/sbin/lilo
LiloMap=/boot/map
RebootCmd=/sbin/reboot
UseLilo=false

[X-*-Core]
AllowNullPasswd=true
AllowRootLogin=true
AllowShutdown=Root
AutoReLogin=false
Reset=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xreset
Resources=/etc/X11/Xresources
Session=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession
Setup=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsetup
Startup=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xstartup

[X-*-Greeter]
AntiAliasing=true
ColorScheme=Default
DefaultUser=gpdefryn
EchoMode=OneStar
FaceSource=PreferAdmin
FailFont=Sans,10,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0
FocusPasswd=false
GUIStyle=Bluecurve
GreetFont=Sans,12,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0
GreetString=Welcome to the Jungle
GreeterPosFixed=false
GreeterPosX=100
GreeterPosY=100
HiddenUsers=adm,alias,amanda,apache,bin,bind,daemon,exim,falken,ftp,games,gdm,gopher,halt,httpd,ident,ingres,kmem,lp,mail,mailnull,man,mta,mysql,named,news,nfsnobody,nobody,nscd,ntp,operator,pcap,pop,postfix,postgres,qmaild,qmaill,qmailp,qmailq,qmailr,qmails,radvd,reboot,rpc,rpcuser,rpm,sendmail,shutdown,squid,sympa,sync,tty,uucp,xfs,xten
Language=en_US
LogoArea=Clock
LogoPixmap=
MaxShowUID=65000
MinShowUID=500
PreselectUser=None
SelectedUsers=myname
SessionTypes=default,kde,failsafe,gnome,
ShowUsers=Selected
SortUsers=true
StdFont=Sans,10,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
UseBackground=true

[X-:*-Core]
AllowNullPasswd=true
AllowRootLogin=true
AllowShutdown=All
NoPassEnable=false
NoPassUsers=

[X-:0-Core]
AutoLoginEnable=false
AutoLoginUser=myname

[Xdmcp]
Enable=false
Willing=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xwilling
Xaccess=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xaccess

any ideas

[Allblack]

Oops. Looks like kdm was not running.
However, I am having problems configuring at runlevel 5

chkconfig --level 5 /usr/bin/kdm on
error reading information on service /usr/bin/kdm: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/kdm is returned when I do a which kdm
and I was able to start it when I ran kdm -nodaemon from level 3

[Dolda2000]

What distro are you using?

[Allblack]

I am using Redhat 9