Dear Slackware Users,

I am running an old netbook "eeepc HA 1005" which AFAIK has an Intel graphics chipset for graphics.

One issue that I am facing is that for login on Slackware 15.0 I get a KDE login which redraws a lot of times when entering the password for the individual users which makes the system feel a bit sluggish (which it is not - Slackware is great work).

I have been researching the wiki a bit for alternative lighter window/login managers (I am pretty sure that this is not the right term) and came across

https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:window_managers:slim

SLiM still compiles fine and I could create a package out of it and installed it, rebooted did "xwmconfig" to create a new file but once inside XFCE etc. I couldn't configure networking (WLAN) anymore as I apparently had no authorization to do this.

I had a look at the Wiki author's profile but he doesn't seem to be no longer visiting this forum so I was wondering if anyone could help me out.

Have a good day,
Mkd75

IIRC sddm starts the dbus session which enables logind to grant permissions to the user.

Since slim and the XFCE start up script startxfce4 are still written to use ck-launch instead of dbus-launch you have problems with device communication in your desktop session. You could try
modifying your ~/.xsession file as shown below so it starts the dbus.


########################################################################
## Start DBUS session bus ##
########################################################################


if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ]; then
eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session)
fi

##################
## Start XFCE ##
##################

exec /usr/bin/startxfce4


Additionally there is not much difference between slim and a customized xdm which can look respectable when it is themed. XDM starts the dbus from the /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession file.

phenixia2003 XDM post here
xdm-slackware-theme

1 members found this post helpful.

When migrating from Slackware 14.2 to Slackware 15.0 I found that SDDM did not really cut the mustard and started evaluating a bunch of login managers. Slim was one of the login managers that I did evaluate and it would really have been nice if I such a small installation would have been sufficient to provide all that I wanted from a login manager. However, in the end my choice fell on tdm, the login manager from Trinity Desktop Environment which is a clone of KDE3 which really makes tdm being a clone of good old kdm. The drawback of installing tdm is that it is not just a small stand alone login manager, it basically requires you to install much of the Trinity Desktop Environment.

I was looking for a login manager which was at least as good as good old kdm and I found it in tdm which almost was an exact copy. Listing my requirements boiled down to this if I remember all:

• Being able to choose desktop environment (xfce, plasma, fvwm...) at login
• Being able to perform nice shutdowns and reboots at login screen with warnings about any users logged in from network.
• Being able to list users (locally or from a NIS domain) selected by a local configuration file
• Allowing remote xdmcp connections (yes I know those are insecure, but might still be useful with VPN connection)
• Support for spawning new sessions on different virtual terminals when screen is locked with xscreensaver

For me it was a bonus that all of the above features could be configured in a configuration file looking just like good old kdmrc. Of course I also wanted a login manager to be stable and without glitches, that could not be said about all tested login managers. If I remember right slim felt stable but lacked some of the features that I wanted, but sddm did not even feel very stable which might be excused by its low version number (0.19 if I remember right). It also felt a bit discouraging that one of my required features (xdmcp) would never be implemented in sddm.

Did tdm have any drawback at all compared to good old kdm? Yes, the login dialog had a window bar with the annoying text "Login to TDE". Even though tde became one of many selectable desktop environments at login, I thought that "Login to Slackware" would be a more appropriate text. This text could not be configured in any configuration file, so I modified the sources before recompiling (or maybe I just modified a translation file, I can't remember for sure).

regards Henrik

The slim package from slackbuilds.org has a broken PAM configuration and fails to start proper desktop sessions with elogind, which results in a broken user experience in modern desktop environments, like you see.

It doesn't have anything to do with starting a dbus session. Elogind runs on the system dbus, which gets started at boot from the rc.messagebus script, and then later on elogind starts with rc.elogind. The missing piece is telling elogind when a user session starts from slim, which is supposed to happen in slim's PAM stack at login.

~~~~~~~~

This issue with slim has popped up here on the forums a few times recently and last time I looked into it there needs to be changes made to slim's PAM setup to fix the package. It uses some crap config files for PAM that look like they're meant for another distro which do not work on Slackware.

If you want to see slim working better and don't mind changing some config files, the following works (verified from a few minutes of testing):

1. Use the PAM config from XDM for slim by making a copy, naming it to slim, and putting it into the proper directory. As root:
Note: This config should work "as-is". The one that slim installs in /etc/pam.d/slim/slim.pam is garbage and can be ignored. Also don't use that /etc/pam.d/slim/ sub-drectory. PAM doesn't seem to find the config file there and needs to be at /etc/pam.d/slim instead. In the above steps, I move this directory out of the way so I can use that filename for slim's PAM config file instead.

2. There's the "slimlock" pam config as well. This I'm not sure on the use of, but its also wrong since it references a PAM config file thats non existent on Slackware. The following steps will grab a copy, edit the line to use slackware's system-auth, and put it in a spot where PAM can find it:
I tried those changes which results in a session started from slim being properly tracked in "loginctl list-sessions", and being able to edit wifi connections in xfce, etc are working.

~~~~~~~~

These changes should really be made by the package maintainer, to tailor the package to Slackware's PAM setup. Personally I'm not interested in maintaining/updating slim as I already maintain and use the GDM build on slackbuilds.org. Feel free to point the maintainer to this thread though. It could be the case that the maintainer only uses slim for simple window managers without elogind, or the package is not maintained at all and just been that way since PAM was added to Slackware.

Edit: After further poking around with slim, there seems to be other broken things about it, e.g: not being able to "switch user". There's also other things that are off like the docs.slackware.com article talking about changing desktop selection with xwmconfig, but its "F1" that you use instead. Probably best to just use a display manager like xdm or sddm, which has been kept up to date with Slackware.

First of all, thank you for all your replies which all express an in-depth knowledge of Linux and Slackware. I am really impressed.

I decided to use hashes to ignore the added lines from the wiki article I posted and everything is okay so far.

As suggested I wrote an email to the SLiM package maintainer and pointed him towards this discussion.

Again thank you very much for looking into this.

Kind regards, Mkd75