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