gdm WM chooser

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Thu Jul 21 12:05:27 UTC 2011


On Thursday 21 July 2011 09:51:23 François Patte wrote:
> Once upon a time, I could choose my window manager and language from the
> gdm greeter. I recently installed F14 and this possibility is no longer
> there: did I miss to install some package? And which one?

You still can do it in gdm, the only difference (as compared to the "old" 
behavior we are all used to) is that you need to type your username first.

The steps are actually like this:

1) you type your username
2) the menu with options appears in the bottom row
3) you choose the options you want from the menu
4) you type your password
5) you click the login button

As stupid as it may look, this options menu is unavailable before you type 
your username. My guess is that this design avoids abuse on a multiuser system 
(for example, you choose some ugly window manager, some obscure-character 
language, and leave the settings for the poor next user to log in without 
checking them...).

A lot of people have been flaming gdm for this when it was introduced several 
Fedora versions back (I don't remember exactly). After a while some got used 
to it, while others switched to kdm and lived happily-everafter. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko



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