GDM CVS, Meet Debian

Posted on by James Cape

The following is instructions on how to get your debian unstable working with gdm2 from CVS:

  1. Install GDM from CVS. I recommend jhbuild, but you will need to go into gdm2/vicious-extensions/ and run cvs -z3 update -rgnome-2-6, or gdm2 won’t get past autogen.sh.
  2. Use this version of /etc/init.d/gdm. Be sure to edit the $PREFIX var at the top.
  3. Copy this version of default.desktop to your $prefix/etc/dm/Sessions directory.
  4. Edit your $prefix/etc/gdm/gdm.conf file to taste. Of particular importance is the “Exclude” and “MinimalUID” keys—they determine which users should be shown/not shown in the face browser and user-selector-applet.
  5. Edit your ~/.Xclients script (the new “.xsession” startup script). You will need to set the proper environment variables to run your gnome cvs desktop from here as well.

    6. Logout, shut down gdm, and start it up again.

Have fun. 🙂