What is the "thinnest" display manager available?

[Teske, Devin]

On Nov 28, 2013, at 4:31 PM, Da Rock wrote:

> On 11/29/13 01:46, Teske, Devin wrote:
>> On Nov 28, 2013, at 5:10 AM, James Griffin wrote:
>> 
>>>        On 11/27/13 06:55, Walter Hurry wrote:
>>>        > On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 09:59:07 +0100, Polytropon wrote:
>>>        >
>>>        >> Source: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x-xdm.html
>>>        >>
>>>        >> Allow me to ask the following question:
>>>        >>
>>>        >> Is xdm (and as far as I know, also wdm) still an exception from the
>>>        >> "rc.conf rule", or how is it supposed to be started on "more modern"
>>>        >> versions?
>>>        > I'd be interested in the answer to that too, as I use XDM on ttyv8 per
>>>        > the handbook, and it has been faultless for me.
>>>        I still use ttys like Polytropon, but I believe recommended practice is
>>>        to use an rc.d system - just nobody has/could be bothered actually
>>>        writing one :D
>>> 
>>>        Maybe I'll (or someone else) get a round tuit one day, but I wouldn't
>>>        hold your breath: it's been on the books for near a decade :)
>>>        _______________________________________________
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Actually, I came across a script written by someone for the CDE desktop.
>>> It would be easy to modify it for another X11 DM (I would think).
>>> 
>>> Might be helpful to someone looking for a script of that type.
>> Funny to see someone say "it's been on the books for near a decade"
>> 
>> At $work, we launched xdm from rc.d for about that long (a decade)
>> and then moved away from it (toward ttys).
>> 
>> Dusted off and attached for your pleasure.
>> 
>> 
> Wow, awesome! I'll look at using that... :D
> 
> Have you considered committing it to the port? And why move away from that to ttys again?

Reason we first started putting the onus on an rc.d script was because we wanted the
script to be able to decide (based on the hostname) whether XDM would be started or not.

HINT: Hostnames that are known to be workstations (versus servers) would start XDM,
otherwise XDM is not started.

Well, when we migrated from FreeBSD-4.11 to FreeBSD-8, we found that XDM had changed
considerably, and was no longer the animal we had patches for.

Being in the situation that our old patches would not apply, we decided...

We're going to write one from scratch. In Perl/Tk.

In that rewrite, we moved the logic into the application. So now...

Every machine has an entry for our display manager and the display manager decides
(again, based on the hostname) whether to start X and display a login window, otherwise
just launch getty for the vty.
-- 
Devin

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