Fedora Tips

by Krishnan Subramanian

2004-03-08 Fedora Tips 50:
I discovered how to get the Start New Session option to work under KDE 3.2 under Fedora. I happened to discover this while I was trying to fix a problem on one of my machines which runs Debian unstable. This was tested on Fedora Core 1 with all of the available updates and KDE 3.2 from www.kde.org.

Normally, when you log into KDE, there isn't an option to start a new session on the K Menu (right under the Run Command...). You need to be root and you have to cd to /etc/X11/xdm. Next, copy Xservers to Xservers.bak in case you make a mistake. Then chmod +w Xservers since it isn't writeable normally. Don't forget to change it back when you are done. Next, you have to edit Xservers.

Here is the original version that came with Fedora...

#
# Xservers file, workstation prototype
#
# This file should contain an entry to start the server on the
# local display; if you have more than one display (not screen),
# you can add entries to the list (one per line).  If you also
# have some X terminals connected which do not support XDMCP,
# you can add them here as well.  Each X terminal line should
# look like:
#       XTerminalName:0 foreign
#
:0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X

and here is my edited version

#
# Xservers file, workstation prototype
#
# This file should contain an entry to start the server on the
# local display; if you have more than one display (not screen),
# you can add entries to the list (one per line).  If you also
# have some X terminals connected which do not support XDMCP,
# you can add them here as well.  Each X terminal line should
# look like:
#       XTerminalName:0 foreign
#
:0 local@tty1 /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp vt7
:1 local@tty2 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :1 vt8
#:2 local@tty3 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :2 vt9
#:3 local@tty4 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :3 vt10
#:4 local@tty5 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :4 vt11

You can uncomment out the other lines to have more sessions available. I don't know if this will cause problems for GDM or XDM as I haven't personally tested them. Plus, I believe you have to be running KDM and KDE for this to work.

I have attached a PNG file which is of my Kmenu which shows what I am talking about - submitted by Eric Nash.