LightDM Tips & Tricks

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LightDM Tips & Tricks

 
Hey there Linux users,

In this post I will be showing you a few LightDM tips, since that DM is based on GTK+ and isn’t native to KDE integrated so you won’t have a GUI tool to configure it.

Below is a video with some LightDM tips and tricks by my good friend Chris Titus. I made an Alias to easily edit the Config file, just type ‘nldm’ once logged in and edit it.
 

 

LightDM Configuration
Start out with opening up your /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and this is where most of the modifications will take place.

To do that I have included an Alias you can run in Terminal. Just type “nldm” (no quotes) and file will run.

Changing the Default Desktop Environment
To specify a specific desktop environment you need to change the user-session line to be your desktop environment. For example I use the awesome window manager for mine and I put user-session=awesome

Note: If you don’t know the name, the desktop environment list can be found with listing .desktop file from /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop

For complete listing of user sessions type: ls /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop

AutoLogin with LightDM
Change the following part of the file to autologin. Note: This does pose a security risk and should never be done in a business

found Under [Seat:*]
 

 

I generally uncomment the following lines above and just change this line autologin-user=username and then it will autologin that user on the next reboot.

 

Note: You can use the autologin-guest instead of user to have it autologin as a guest account.

 

VNC Connection
At the bottom of the lightdm.conf file you will see VNC connection information. This information uses the tigervnc package and also is done using secure channel. This means you must establish a SSH connection with a portforward before you can connect to VNC.

Example: ssh 192.168.69.10 -L 9901:localhost:5901 This establishes ssh and port forwards your local port 9901 to 5901 of the remote machine. Then you could launch VNC viewer with vncviewer localhost:9901. Even though this says localhost it is forwarding the request through SSH to the remote machine.

Now with that framework lets look at the conf file:
 

 
The main things to change here are enabled=true width - height - depth and then you are off. My typical defaults would look like the following:
 

 
Conclusion
LightDM is very flexible, you just need to tinker around with it. Have fun and do let me know how it goes.