The K Desktop Environment

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2. Installing kdm

See the file README! It will tell you how to compile kdm. NOTE: make install will overwrite your previous kdmrc.

Then you should insert the line

kdmdesktop
in the file called XSetup_0 or similar in the xdm config directory (often /etc/X11/xdm/XSetup_0). Make sure the path is set, so that kdmdesktop can be executed.

If you chose the PAM option, then you should check /etc/pam.conf for the lines

# xdm authorization
xdm    auth       required     pam_unix_auth.so
xdm    auth       required     pam_unix_acct.so
and insert them, if they aren't there.

Now it's time to test kdm. You should bring your system to a runlevel that doesn't run xdm and try (as root) to say:

> kdm -nodaemon
If you get a kdm login box and you are able to log in, things are great. The main thing that can go wrong here, is that the runtime linker might not find the shared Qt or KDE libraries. When everything works, then edit /etc/inittab to execute kdm instead of xdm. If you have a binary distribution of the KDE libraries, it might be nescesary to tell kdm where kde is installed (if the location of kde isn't found, icons will miss). This is done with the "kdm -kdedir /path/to/kde" option (note that KDEDIR cant be set if kdm is started from inittab). If you dont like changing inittab, you might instead rename xdm to xdm.bak and make xdm a symlink to kdm. Kdm will read the general display manager settings from the xdm configuartion files and the kdm specific ones from the file $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc. Kdmdesktop will also read kdmrc.

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