Re: What's the story with gdm?

[Martin Kasper Petersen <mkp socsci auc dk>]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Shacklette <jmshack@home.com> writes:

Mark> Does gdm work?  I've tried to use it, and each time have met
Mark> with failure.  From postings on the net, it appears that there
Mark> may be some problems with it.  Does anyone have it working?  I'm
Mark> wondering if I'm just missing something, or if there is some
Mark> core problem with its functionality.

Yes, GDM does work. Unlike most of the other Gnome software, however,
GDM is a system daemon. It relies on stuff that varies greatly between
distributions. If I made it trivial to install in Red Hat it would
probably break horribly on Debian. Therefore I try to keep the
official tarball clean and leave all tweaking to the distribution
maintainers.

Fortunately there are plenty of people out there willing to create
binary packages for their favorite distribution.

If you want to compile/install yourself, reading the GDM manual and
the xdm manpage are prerequisites. And you need to know how your user
authentication system (PAM/crypt/shadow passwords) and TCP wrappers
are configured. And you need to make sure both the gdm user and the
gdm group exist on the system. And you should know how your
distribution handles different desktop environments. And... 

So, erm, yes. GDM requires a bit of hacking to get running.

-- 
Martin Kasper Petersen			BOFH, IC1&2, Aalborg University, DK
mailto:mkp@SunSITE.auc.dk		http://SunSITE.auc.dk/~mkp/