Default Desktop/X Login Manager

[Guest]

I'd like to use kdm instead of xdm as the default (started at boot time) X login manager. kdm is better for my purposes as my gentoo machine is headless, and kdm offers a menu of window managers for the remote machine to select from. I have both xdm and kdm configured ok.

It looks to me like the system starts up one of the three "dm"s (gdm being the third) from /etc/init.d/xdm, after that script has been added to one of the runlevels. So far, so good. The "xdm" script decides which dm to use by looking for the DISPLAYMANAGER variable from /etc/profile.env. So, it seems that I am meant to select the default dm by exporting DISPLAYMANANGER="kdm" from within /etc/profile.env.

The problem is, that /etc/profile.env seems to be overwritten at some earlier point in the boot process. Is there a file I am supposed to be modifying instead, that will be used in the boot-time recreation of /etc/profile.env?

I understand that I could modify /etc/init.d/xdm to make kdm the default window manager. It seems like someone went through some trouble to set things up in a more sophisticated way, though, and I'd to like to "do it right", through the means provided in the script, if I could. I'll start breaking things later once I understand better how the system works. I'm a long time Slackware user, and am pretty amazed so far.

[delta407]

RTFM. Edit your /etc/rc.conf.

[Guest]

Thanks for the answer. I had forgotten all about rc.conf.