Managing my sessions with CDM
In my pursuit for a fast and functional workstation environment, I am slowly migrating away from GNOME based applications towards less complex and lightweight applications that work well together with XMonad. An obvious candidate for replacement is GDM, the GNOME Display Manager. It’s basically a graphical login program that launches the correct desktop environment and/or window manager. And while GDM works quite well, there were some minor annoyances. For example, GDM overwrites the keyboard layout in GNOME, making keyboard configuration in GNOME useless.
I’ve considered a few alternatives. KDM is of course out of the question. It doesn’t even come close to being lightweight and I’d rather use Windows than pull in any kind of KDE dependency. Viable alternatives are among others SLIM, Qingy and simply using startx to fire up XMonad. I’ve tryed out SLIM briefly in the past but wanted something even more simple and from what I’ve read, SLIM is not begin further developed. Startx is of course as easy as it can possibly get but is in itself featureless and only works well for a single user/session.
In the end I went with CDM, the Console Display Manager, developed by Ghost1227, a fellow Arch Linux user. It is a minimimalistic, full featured, dialog-based login manager written in pure bash. It supports multiple users/sessions and can start virtually any window manager or desktop environment. I am impressed that it can fire up multiple X sessions of the same user on different ttys.
One step closer to a GNOMEless system.