The First Display

On many systems, the display or

login manager is the first GUI

program the user sees. Most

major distributions automatically launch

the X Window system. Users type their

names and passwords to log on and

select an environment. They can often

select other options, such as an option

for shutting down or rebooting.

KDM, by the KDE project, and its

Gnome counterpart GDM are the most

popular display managers, but there are

a number of alternatives, such as the

legacy XDM or the small-footprint WDM

managers. The login manager has no

influence on the desktop the machine

runs; even the biggest KDE fans could

still use GDM to log on to the system and

launch their favorite environment. The

only disadvantage is that installing GDM

puts a lot of Gnome libraries

on your hard disk, taking up

valuable storage space. This

article explains how to change

the display manager on

Fedora Core 2, Suse Linux 9.1,

and Mandrake Linux 10.0,

and how you can add window

managers to the drop-down

list.