Making XDM look good

boroshan · l33t Joined: 16 Apr 2003 Posts: 730 Location: upside down

here's mine

The shutdown and reboot buttons are cribbed from qingy (which is a bit unstable on my laptop). The buttons change colour with mouseover events, and you get a 5 second countdown to change your mind. They're written in Perl/Tk rather than Tcl/Tk, but the package is part of the standard perl distribution, so it should run for everyone with minimal modifications.

button widget
countdown widget

I also use FVWM in a minimal configuration under xdm. It gives me some fine control over title bars, borders and the like, as well as a menu, although all I use that for now is screenshots

I think I'll see about using it for session management, now that I know how to do it.
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aminal · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2005 3:56 pm Post subject:

Does anyone know how to get xcompmgr to work at the xdm login screen? I see one person has a screenie with it working, but when I try, the background image doesn't load.

Thanks

gungholady · Guru Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 392

Thanks Pwnz3r and hicksboson. Now I don't have to worry about gdm not working with USE="-pam". Here is a screenshot of my xdm:

http://www.brannanorwills.com/xdmshot.png

Omega21 · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 3:06 am Post subject:

I will probably get flamed big for this, but I really think that Windows XP's (Home edition)
login screen was done very well. I really like the animation and the user icons. I doubt XDM
is capable of that, but some time in the next 2 years Id like to modify it to be like XP's..
Heck even Mandrake's mod of KDM would be nice. Anyways, Im very impressed with what
I can see XDM does. I just may try it.
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gungholady · Guru Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 392

I have an error in my xdm.log that I can't find the source of. I've solved the other errors. Here is the one that I don't know where for sure where the problem is or how to fix it. I think it has to do with the kmrc file. Here is the relevant portion of the xdm.log:

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

gungholady: Perhaps you could try moving the kdmrc from the normal location and running XDM. Other than that, I cannot help much with that.

aminal: Make sure that xcompmgr runs first and that it has an & after it. I will try that too really quick. Cheers.

Omega21: This was already spoken in another topic which you created, so stop trying to threadjack because nobody really cares about the XP login screen in a topic about customizing XDM.

gungholady · Guru Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 392

Moving the kdmrc file did not solve the problem. I'm not sure where the error is coming from.

aminal · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:49 am Post subject:

Omega21 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 4:08 am Post subject:

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

Omega21: Good luck with that. I would try to help you, but I never liked the WinXP login screen.

aminal: I wish I could help more, but I am out of ideas. Cheers.

boroshan · l33t Joined: 16 Apr 2003 Posts: 730 Location: upside down

Hi Gang!

I've got my XDM working quite nicely now. I've even set it up to run timidity and play a random selection of cool jazz tracks over the login screen. The only trouble comes when I log in: the timidity process gets killed and the noise is cut off sharp. What I want is a way to fade the tune out before killing the midi process. I could send commands to the dumb interface if I had a pipe open, and there has got to be one of timidity's many interfaces that supports some sort of remote control, if only I understood more of those myriad TLAs. But every time I try I get dazzled by the alphabet soup.

So. Does anyone here know much about timidity?
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whitesouls · Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 8:59 am Post subject:

i would really like to thank this big timer herr... " Pwnz3r " ...u did a good job...but your grub splashscreens are high coloured...where i have to hunt for others...and now i using and IBM's one...i'll post the screenshot later...but ur wallpapers and grub splashscreen are simply nice man..

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Please insert the [SOLVED] tag if your problem is solved in your respective thread.

morbus · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 1:28 am Post subject:

Another great thing is using torsmo with xdm. just add

groovin · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 4:07 pm Post subject:

i just installed gentoo on a new system. on my old system, i got xdm looking great thanks to this thread, but on my new system, the login screen doesnt show any background... i also dont seem to have xsetbg on my system. anyone got an idea why thats so and where i can get xsetbg back from? thanks

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

vrln · Guru Joined: 11 Sep 2004 Posts: 534 Location: Finland

One of the great mysteries of Linux, in my opinion, is that why do many popular programs that have the potential to look awesome have to look horrible "out of the box". There are plenty of examples: Fluxbox, Openbox, XDM, FVWM, Aterm, Eterm and the list goes on.
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Pixelbrei · n00b Joined: 25 Apr 2003 Posts: 62

heh, nice, i just "pimped" my xdm, too, because of the load of dependencies of the other dms.
have a look

http://blubb.at/pixelbrei/xdm.jpg

btw, fvwm and xdm work kinda well together. bottom left are some fvwmbuttons.
ok, the rest is kinda minimalistic, perhaps i will make a more interesting xdm-config some time.

thaswiftness · n00b Joined: 31 May 2005 Posts: 34 Location: Florida

Figured I'd share mine too.

Thanks for the tutorial and all the other helpful posts.

Pixelbrei · n00b Joined: 25 Apr 2003 Posts: 62

geniux · Veteran Joined: 19 Feb 2004 Posts: 1400 Location: /home

geniux · Veteran Joined: 19 Feb 2004 Posts: 1400 Location: /home

Ok, thanks to you all
Here's mine. It's my first, so I guess I'll tune it a bit or perhaps change it totaly sometime. It sure was fun doing it :wink:

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lamaistres · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 6:15 am Post subject:

Here's a tip for many hours of enjoyment. Run an xscreensaver as the xdm background. Replace "blocktube" with any of the 200 xscreensavers in /usr/lib/misc/xscreensaver/.

/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0

dalcorta · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 36

I copied your config ( /etc) file to try it out It looks great but now when I login it doesn't go to fvwm it just restarts xdm? what is wrong?

coriolan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Apr 2005 Posts: 273

philidias · n00b Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 6