wdm.options - configuration options for WINGs display manager

/etc/X11/wdm/wdm.options contains a set of flags that determine some of the behavior of the WINGs display manager wdm(1).

/etc/X11/wdm/wdm.options may contain comments, which begin with a hash mark and end at the next newline, just like comments in shell scripts. The rest of the file consists of options which are expressed as words separated by hyphens, with only one option per line. If an option is present with the "no-" prefix, or absent, it is disabled, otherwise it is considered enabled.

Available options are:

auto-update-wmlist

If set, this option will cause wdm always regenerate the contents of the session menu when starting. It is set by default but should be disabled if you wish to manually specify the list of available window managers.

ignore-nologin

Normally, the contents of the /etc/nologin file will be displayed using xmessage (if xmessage is available), and the user will be returned to the wdm login screen after the xmessage is dismissed. If this option is enabled, wdm starts a session as usual (after the xmessage is dismissed, if xmessage is available).

restart-on-upgrade

Enable this option with caution on "production" machines; it causes the wdm daemon to be stopped and restarted on upgrade, even if the process has children (which means it is managing X sessions). Typically when a package that contains a daemon is being installed or upgraded, its maintainer scripts stop a running daemon process before installing the new binary, and restart it after the new binary is installed. Stopping wdm causes immediate termination of any sessions it manages; in some situations this could be an unwelcome surprise (for instance, for remote wdm users who had no idea the administrator was performing system maintenance). On the other hand, for machines that stay up for long periods of time, leaving the old daemon running can be a bad idea if the new version has, for instance, a fix for a security vulnerability (overwriting wdm's executable on the file system has no effect on the copy of wdm in memory). The wdm pre-removal script checks to see if the wdm process has any children; if it does, it is possible that someone's session would be killed by stopping wdm, so a warning is issued and an opportunity to abort the upgrade of wdm is provided. If this option is disabled (the Debian default), wdm will be stopped and restarted during an install or upgrade only if the running wdm process is found to have no children. In the event the wdm daemon is not stopped and restarted, the administrator will have to do so by hand (probably with "/etc/init.d/wdm restart", or by rebooting the system) before the newly installed wdm binary is used.

run-xconsole

This option opens an xconsole(1) client to catch messages that would normally go to the Linux virtual console and thus be missed in many cases by the user. By default, this option is only supported in the Xsetup file for display :0 (/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0), but any Xsetup script may use it if appropriately edited.

use-sessreg

If this option is enabled (the Debian default), the sessreg program will be invoked to register X sessions managed by wdm in the utmp and wtmp files. Otherwise, it is not, and the utmp and wtmp files will have no record of wdm sessions.

Flags controlling wdm used to be kept in /etc/X11/config on Debian/GNU Linux systems.

sessreg(1), xconsole(1), xmessage(1), wdm(1)

This manpage was written by Branden Robinson for Debian GNU/Linux and modified by Marcelo Magallon for wdm.