The X Display Manager (XDM) is the default

display manager In the X Window System, an X display manager is a graphical login manager which starts a login session on an X server from the same or another computer. A display manager presents the user with a login screen. A session starts when a user s ...

for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. It is a bare-bones X display manager. It was introduced with X11 Release 3 in October 1988, to support the standalone

X terminal X, or x, is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ex'' (pronounced ), plural ''exes''."X", ' ...

s that were just coming onto the market. It was written by

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the ...

Functions

XDM is used to boot an X.org based

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

. It can control a display directly or indirectly in order to start an X session and supports remote login. XDM is initialized on system startup. It can be edited through the use of a configuration file, modules, or scripts. The configuration file is usually found in /usr/lib/X11/xdm/xdm-config.

History

XDM is one of the earliest display managers for Linux. It was developed by Keith Packard after he joined the X Consortium due to his frustration using a text-based environment to try and configure X. XDM is available but unused on most systems because of its rudimentary nature. Desktop environments released afterwards tended to include their own display manager, such as dtlogin on

CDE CDE may refer to: Education * California Department of Education * Career Development Event, a type of contest sponsored by the National FFA Organization * Center for Data Engineering, IIIT Hyderabad * Center for Distance Education at University of ...

Functions

History

See also

References

Further reading