# Display manager



## xdevelnet (Jul 21, 2014)

Is there any display manager that works under FreeBSD? I have MATE 1.8 installed and working , but I don't know what to do with the display manager.

What we have: 

GDM needs a lot of GNOME2 dependencies;
KDM can't be installed separately, only with KDE4;
LXDM just does not exist (LXDE exists);
SLIM is buggy crap (ignores any /etc/profile, ~/.profile files, ignores any default environment variables);
XDM didn't work.

Now I am simply using login with TTY and typing `startx`. It works well, but... year 2014 outside!

Can you help me please?

Regards, xdevelnet.


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## asteriskRoss (Jul 22, 2014)

I personally found that x11/slim was the quickest to set up (particularly using themes), but I couldn't find a way to configure it to recognise my keyboard layout properly and I wanted to be able to power off laptops from the login screen without needing the root password.  I switched to x11/xdm, which I prefer overall.  It is very configurable, though to do so takes some time.  Whilst it is possible to improve its looks, I don't know that I would describe it as beautiful.  I found this webpage on XDM configuration that I found useful to get started.  Rather than using XDM's default location for configuration files, I changed it to the /usr/local/etc/xdm directory and modified copies of the files from /usr/local/share/examples/xdm.  So it would read my configuration files, I modified the line in /etc/ttys:

```
ttyv8	"/usr/local/bin/xdm -config /usr/local/etc/xdm/xdm-config -nodaemon"	xterm	on secure
```


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## xdevelnet (Jul 22, 2014)

asteriskRoss said:
			
		

> I couldn't find a way to configure it to recognise my keyboard layout properly


How about using xorg.conf? Or DE utilities?

Tnx Thanks for _the_ useful links, I will try to configure XDM.


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## zeissoctopus (Jul 26, 2014)

FreeBSD's x11/xdm has not been patched with sysutils/consolekit support while /x11/slim does this job well.


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## uzsolt (Jul 29, 2014)

I'm the one user on my machine but I don't use any *dm. I think this is an unnecessary layer. What I'm doing? I have an 
	
	



```
autologin:\
    :al=MYUSER:tc=Pc:
```
entry in /etc/gettytab and 

```
ttyv0	"/usr/libexec/getty autologin"		xterm	on  secure
```
in /etc/ttys. So MYUSER will autologin. I have these line in ~/.login (I'm using tcsh() so the syntax differs on sh() or shells/bash):

```
if ($tty == "ttyv0") then
    echo Starting Xorg...
    startx
    echo "Halt (h) Reboot (r) Nothing (n) ?"
    set answer = $<
    if ($answer == "h") then
        /sbin/shutdown -p now
    else if ($answer == "r") then
            /sbin/shutdown -r now
    endif
endif
```

So my FreeBSD boots up, autologin MYUSER, and `startx`. If startx closes (I exit from the window manager) display a message ("Halt (h) Reboot (r) Nothing (n)"), read answer from the user and if answer is "h" the machine is halted, and if it's "r", the machine is rebooted. If it's something else, nothing (I'll have a prompt). MYUSER is a member of operator (as written here).


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## zeissoctopus (Jul 30, 2014)

uzsolt said:
			
		

> I'm the one user on my machine but I don't use any *dm. I think this is an unnecessary layer.
> What I'm doing?



Thank you for your suggestion!


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