Configuring
This chapter assumes that is already up and running on your system, and that you simply want to change its behaviour in some way. If your problem is more serious, skip forward to later chapters.
When starts up, it reads its configuration from the file kdmrc. Since must run before any user is logged in, it is not associated with any particular user. Therefore, it is not possible to have a user-specific $HOME/share/config/kdmrc file; all users share the common version of kdmrc, located in $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc. It follows from this that the configuration of can only be altered by those users that have write-access to $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc (normally restricted to system administrators logged in as "root").
You can view the kdmrc file currently in use on your system (located by default at $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc), and you can configure by editing this file. Alternatively, you can use the graphical configuration tool provided by the KDE Control Centre (under Applications System Login Manager), which is described in the KControl help files.
The remainder of this chapter describes the contents of the kdmrc file. If you are happy using the graphical configuration tool, there's no need to read any further.
There are four sections in kdmrc:

KDM
The keys in this section are:

StdFont
FailFont
GreetFont
GreetString
SessionTypes
LogoArea
LogoPixmap
ShutdownButton
Shutdown
Restart
ConsoleMode
UserView
Users
NoUsers
SortUsers
GUIStyle

A short description of the keys:
*Font 	A fontsstring formatted like this: Courier,12,5,iso-8859-1,50,0.
GreetString 	The title of the login window.
SessionTypes 	A comma-separated list of session arguments, usually used to select a particular window manager. Defaults to SessionTypes=kde,failsafe.
LogoArea 	Controls what appears in the lower left-hand corner of the login window. Can be either KdmLogo (in which case the image specified by LogoPixMap is displayed) or KdmClock (in which case a clock is displayed).
LogoPixmap 	Specifies the image to be displayed in the lower left-hand corner of the login window when LogoArea=KdmLogo.
ShutdownButton 	ShutdownButton controls when the shutdown button is displayed and can be one of All, None, RootOnly and ConsoleOnly. The meaning of All and None is very clear. If you choose ConsoleOnly you can't do a remote shutdown. If you choose RootOnly you will be prompted to enter the root password before the shutdown will proceed.
Shutdown and Restart 	The commands to run on system shutdown and restart, respectively. (Defaults: /sbin/halt and /sbin/reboot respectively.
ConsoleMode 	The command string used by the Console Mode option of the "Shutdown" button. (Default: /sbin/init 3). This option is not available under BSD.
UserView 	If this is set to "1", a graphical view of users will be displayed in the window.
Users 	A comma-separated list of usernames that will be displayed in the graphical user view. If UserView is set to "1" and the Users entry is missing, will look for users in the password file /etc/passwd. The users displayed are those who have a real name beside their login name, a home directory and a default shell - the rest are skipped. will look in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/pics/users/ for an icon for each user. If an icon named johndoe.png exists, will use that for displaying user johndoe. If not, will use default.png.
is able to handle icons of different sizes, but the result looks messy. The solution to this is to use an application such as KDE's Pixie, (or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, (gimp) or John Bradley's XV,) to convert all your images to the same size. A size of 64x64 should give enough resolution, and matches the default icons provided. These two programs can also be used to convert images from various formats into png format.
NoUsers 	A comma-separated list of usernames that won't be displayed. Use it to filter "pseudo-users" like sync and shutdown from the user view.
SortUsers 	If set to "0", the list of users are displayed in the order it was read. The default is to display users in sorted order.
GUIStyle 	Can be either Motif or Windows.

KDMDESKTOP
This section is obsolete. In previous versions of it could be used to control a background screen prior to login. The graphical configurator for may still generate this section, but it is ignored by .

Locale
This section is handled by a standard KDE library. The only keys that are likely to have any effect are:

Country
Language
Charset

A short description of the keys:
Country 	indicates the country. Look in $KDEDIR/share/locale/l10n for the complete list of country codes supported by your system. The country code is used to locate the file $KDEDIR/share/locale/l10n/country_code/entry.desktop which is used to provide locale-specific information such as time and date formats and the local currency symbol.
Language 	indicates the language to use for (default: C, representing US English). The value can be over-ridden by the KDE_LANG environment variable.
Charset 	 indicates the character set to use (default: iso-8859-1).
If you change the keys but all the dialogue text remains in English, this probably indicates that you do not have the translations installed on your system.

Lilo
Lilo (Linux Loader) is a boot manager that is often used on GNU/Linux systems. Lilo comes with extensive documentation (see man lilo as a start). This section configures mechanisms for restarting the system using Lilo. The keys are:

Lilo
LiloCommand
LiloMap

A short description of the keys:
Lilo 	Controls whether Lilo is used to restart the system (default: FALSE). When this key is set to TRUE, the "shutdown" dialogue box contains an extra drop-down configuration box next to the "restart" radio button. The drop-down allows you to select the kernel image that is to be used when rebooting the system. The list of images is created by querying the Lilo map file.
LiloCommand 	 The location of the Lilo binary (default: /sbin/lilo).
LiloMap 	The location of the Lilo map file. The map file is maintained by Lilo and contains a list of kernels (versions of the operating system) to boot (default: /boot/map).