I've tried out both gdm and kdm as login managers, and I've decided I like gdm better. For one thing, it gives you more options for logging in, especially the language settings, which will be useful once I can get this system working with Japanese.

But there's one thing kdm has that gdm doesn't seem to have. When I log out of KDE, under kdm I get a nice selection dialog with choices for logout/shutdown/reboot. Under gdm I get nothing but a confirmation prompt. I have to go back to the login display and then manually shutdown or reboot, which can be a bit of a pain.

So what I want to know is, how can I have gdm and still get a shutdown prompt when I log out? Perhaps there's some other program I can use specifically for logging out? Or maybe someone can recommend a completely different login manager that provides all the features I like. What do you recommend I do?

Hi,
I am running gdm and have a reboot/shutdown option from the actions menu. Try running gdmconfig as root and you will find out!

Good luck.

I know it has the options in the actions menu, but I don't want that. Kdm pops up a selection menu the second you select logout, you can just select shutdown+ok and the system powers down from there. With gdm you have to wait for it to finish logging out, then wait for it to restart x and bring up the login screen again, THEN select shutdown from the action menu before you can actually shut down your system. What a pain. I just want some way to quickly select logout, reboot, or shutdown from within my X session, while retaining gdm as my login manager.

Unless there's some other login manager out there that would give me the same flexibility both at login and logout.

Uhm, gdm isn't running when you are logged in. gdm and kdm (both) just authenticate you, log you in, and pass control over to the window manager you want. You must want to know how to get a shutdown/restart/logout prompt IN Gnome.

David the H.>
I'm sorry for misunderstanding your question. I think what you could do is to find a way of running shutdown/reboot as a regular user (many solutions to this problem, my immediate idea would be to change permissions, which is probably not a good one) and create a gnome menu calling these modified shutdown/reboot commands.

Hope this helps.

Well, however it works. All I know is that when I use gdm to login, the kdm shutdown screen disappears. Logging out seems to hand you back over to whichever display manager daemon is running. I'd be happy to be given the correct info so I can configure things myself.

Actually, right now I can't log out of Gnome at all. It just brings up a warning saying gdm isn't running and hangs everything. I have to crtl+alt+backspace to actually get out of it. It didn't do that before. Must be a bug in the latest version of something.

I mostly use KDE now, but I occasionally log into Gnome to try out new things, and I also occasionally experiment with other WM's.

Mosca, that might do it. I didn't realize that they were standalone programs. How do you suggest I go about it? Is it as simple as changing permissions and setting up the menu items?

How about setting them up with a dedicated group and allowing execute permissions for that group instead of just letting up on overall permissions?

Edit: I see that shutdown and halt (reboot is just a symlink to it) already have execute permissions set for all users, but they still only work for root of course.

david:~$ ls /sbin/halt /sbin/shutdown
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9268 Jun 19 19:40 /sbin/halt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18476 Jun 19 19:40 /sbin/shutdown

What do I need to do to get them working? Should I try to get them configured for use under sudo instead?

Well, I found through another thread that you can 'chmod +s' the halt, reboot, and shutdown programs so that anyone can run them. I set up KDE menu entries to run them and they work well enough. But to be honest, I feel that it's a sub-optimal solution. For one thing there's no confirmation screen. If I accidentally hit the commands there'd be nothing to stop them. Also, the KDE menu seems to alphabetically order it's entries, so they aren't at the bottom where they should be. I wish I could put them next to the logout entry at the very bottom, but there isn't any way to configure those entries at all.

What I really want is a shutdown dialog like kdm offers. Has nobody yet devised a simple graphical shutdown program that anyone can use?