Hi!

I'm trying to have a little fun with kde (development) and I certainly don't want to mess around with things on my normal user so I thought of starting a plain failsafe session with another user from kdm (which I have available on the kdm menu... not the plasma failsafe one but a plain failsafe). This session should (or at least it was so on the old days) start a plain terminal and that's about it. No desktop. But when I start it, nothing happens and I get back to kdm... not what I expected.

I checked on /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/sessions/ and all available sessions (active and inactive as well) are defined there though no "failsafe" session is defined there (though it's on kdm's menu). I thought that I might create a simple file that called rxvt, for example... but then how do I make it show up on kdm's menu? Is there a separate location where the active session types are defined?

Thanks for your help

I managed to solve it. http://maratux.blogspot.com/2011/08/...pe-to-kdm.html

Howdy eantoranz, thanks for the explanation. I have something of the opposite problem: Too much junk in my KDM. There's metacity and twm that do nothing, two version of KDE Plasma in addition to default which is also KDE. In the process of your research, did you find out how to make the junk disappear? -GEF

Oh, that I didn't find. But if you learn something about how to do that, let me know. Check the directories specified on kdmrc where the sessions are defined... perhaps there are files in those directories that you will be able to identify easily.

Much of what the internet has on this subject is obsolete, but I found a gem. In the directory "/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/sessions" find a bunch of *.desktop files. For the ones that appear in your kdm menu, open each with KWrite and add the line "Hidden=True". (Bizarrely, the ones that don't appear in my KDM menu lack this line.) Also, you can create custom.desktop, default.desktop, and failsafe.desktop, also with the line "Hidden=True" to get rid of their entries as well. I now have a nice, short menu where every choice does something. It seems that anything in the directory "/usr/share/xsessions" is superceded by contents of the kdm sessions directory. If it matters, my distro is openSUSE 11.4. -GEF

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