From ArchWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Installation 3 Configuration 3.1 Themes 3.2 Themes creation 3.3 kdmrc 3.3.1 ServerArgsLocal 3.3.2 SessionsDirs 3.3.3 Session 4 Troubleshooting 4.1 Keyboard maps

Introduction

KDM (KDE Display Manager) is the login manager of KDE. It supports themes, auto-logging, session type choice, etc.

Installation

See Display Manager for installation instructions.

Configuration

KDM can be configured from the KDE System Settings program but you need to run it as root:

• in KDEMod it will automatically ask you the root password
• in KDE you can use kdesu:

$ kdesu systemsettings

Themes

Archlinux KDM themes can be installed like this:

# pacman -S archlinux-themes-kdm

Many other KDM 4 themes are available at http://kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=41. Choose between the installed themes in System Settings (run as root) as described above.

Themes creation

Themes files are in /usr/share/apps/kdm/themes.

The theme format is the same one as GDM, a documentation can be found here: Detailed Description of Theme XML format.

kdmrc

The master configuration file is /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. The default file contains comprehensive comments about the function of each item.

ServerArgsLocal

To force the number of dots per inch of the X server, add a -dpi option to ServerArgsLocal. A commonly used value is 96 dpi.

ServerArgsLocal=-dpi 96 -nolisten tcp

SessionsDirs

This variable stores a list of directories containing session type definitions in .desktop format, ordered by falling priority. In Arch Linux some window managers install such files in /etc/X11/sessions or /usr/share/xsessions. Add these to the list in order to be able to select them in KDM.

SessionsDirs=/usr/share/config/kdm/sessions,/usr/share/apps/kdm/sessions,/etc/X11/sessions,/usr/share/xsessions

Session

The Session variable is the name of a program which is run as the user who logs in. It is supposed to interpret the session argument (see SessionsDirs) and start the session as desired for that argument. One may wish to customize this for window manager sessions, for example to set a wallpaper and start a screensaver. To do this in a way which will survive pacman updates (which clobber Xsession) do as follows:

cp /usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession /usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession.custom

In kdmrc set

Session=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession.custom

And then edit Xsession.custom as desired.

Troubleshooting

Keyboard maps

KDM depends on Xorg for keyboard input so if you don't have the good keymap check your xorg.conf file.

See the Xorg article for instructions.