YJL

Console Display Manager is another great program I found on forums. I downloaded it from GitHub, the authors website seems to be down. Followed that wiki page to configure it, then deactivated XDM and rebooted. I logged in in console and the display manager showed up

CDM works a little different than other DMs. You log in in console (tty1), then /etc/profile.d/zzz-cdm-profile.sh kicks in and you see the display manager. It checks if you are in console, then launches cdm and you choose DE/WM to continue. Basically, you dont need to manually run startx just press the enter key.

I use the default theme instead of cdm theme. You can try those themes (/usr/share/cdm/themes) just fire up cdm in your terminals, use escape key to quit. You dont have to log out only to see the theme. Honesty, the color schemes are not so good in console, thats the reason I chose default them. Its not fancy but still looks good.

The memory usage is slightly smaller, I believe if its written in C, it would use less. It is written in Bash. This was with XDM:

And this was with CDM:

Its about 2-3 MB less but XDM had two more dbus programs running, so its probably 1-2 MB less.

The reason I used XDM was because I didnt want to type startx, now I have removed the XDM since I still dont need to with CDM. My Gentoo is slimmer a little bit.

My Gentoo updated xinit and X to 1.2.0-r3 and 1.6.5 (I am not sure if the change were made in them, the changes should be made around after 2009-12-08), then XDM didn't bring up fluxbox but the twm.

Here is a related post on Gentoo Forums. In simple words, XSESSION in rc.conf won't be working anymore. You have to do this, in case of fluxbox, as root:

echo "XSESSION=fluxbox" > /etc/env.d/90xsession
env-update

Once you click on shutdown in xsm and login again, it should be working.

PS. I have to reboot, one of my monitors didn't work after turning on using xrandr but fluxbox does.

I had been reading this message after my Xorg and XDM upgraded, This is an unsecure session. I didn't know how to do with it, I googled but got nothing really helpful. I checked the /var/log, somehow I only focused on Xorg.0.log and completely oblivious to xdm.log (I might have eying problem).

xdm.log has pointed out the problem very clear:

xdm error (pid 6186): cannot make authentication directory /var/lib/xdm/authdir: No such file or directory

I didn't have /var/lib/xdm directory, the message was gone after I created that directory.