Lightdm - cannot figure out how to change default xsession - Debian Wheezy
 

Hi

I have installed Lightdm as my login manager for debian wheezy. I have three Desktop Environments/Window Managers installed: LXDE, XFCE4 and awesome. As soon as my machine boots, I am presented with the login screen, where I enter my username/password. There is also a drop down box where I can choose which DE/WM to use.

The problem is that the drop down box always defaults to "Default Xsession", which appears to be LXDE. I use XFCE4 most, and therefore I wish to set "Default XSession" to be XFCE4 so that I don't have to change the option with the drop down menu to manually log into XFCE4.

I have tried editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and changing user-session under [SeatDefaults] to a number of things, such as startxfce4, xfce4-session, xfce-session, xfce4, etc... None of those worked.

How do I change the Default Xsession so that it logs into XFCE4 by default, not LXDE?

Thanks in advance,
James

What DE were you sing when you installed it? I think if you installed it when you were in LXDE that would become the default. If this is the case completely remove it and then reinstall it when you are in XFCE.

Yeah, I was in LXDE when I installed LightDM.

I will try that and post how it goes

EDIT: Nope, that didn't work. I logged into XFCE and ran the following:
However it still logs into lxdm by default

Try this instead
Remove does not remove configurations files, purge does.

Unfortunately that did not seem to work either...

I logged into XFCE and ran those two commands. After the second command, I chose lightdm instead of xdm to be my login manager. However, upon a reboot, "Default XSession" always logged me in with LXDE.

I now only have XDM installed, and logging in through that also logs me in with LXDE.

I did a bit of googling, and found this command:
According to the site (a user on the linux mint forums) the above command "will set cinnamon to default in lightdm".

Do you think if I changed the last argument from cinnamon to something xfce related it may work?
If so, what should the final argument be? xfce4-session, xfce4, xfce, startxfce4, or what else?

Sorry for my third post in a row, but I found a solution (probably more of a workaround, but hey, that still counts as a solution!)

I went into /usr/share/xsessions and found a file called lightdm-xsession.desktop. I then edited lightdm-xsession.desktop, and found a command "exec".

Simply changing this "exec" from "default" to "startxfce4" meant that when I have "Default XSession" selected at the login screen, it starts xfce4 instead of "default".

Well done.

I found another solution.
The Debian manual page [1] says each user can select a different default windows manager using the "exec ..." command in own home folder (in "~/.xsession" file).
And it works form me in Debian Wheezy.

[1] debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch07.en.html#_customizing_the_x_session_classic_method

Found a reasonable way to accomplish this
 

I had a virtually identical challenge with wheezy stable, I switched from LXDE to a plain openbox WM and had to select it manually for each login. To change the default you need to change the symlink at /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager to point at the appropriate session starter (so I needed to point it at /usr/bin/openbox-session).

The easiest way to accomplish this (the way I actually did it) is to use update-alternatives:

# update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

you will get a list of options, select xcfe and you will be set.