Hello All,
I thought that it would be fun to add an additional desktop and have the option to boot into either desktop of openSUSE at boot in. I am currently running KDE as my desktop and I think that I successfully installed all of the elements of cinnamon into my system. In addition, I have also installed the MDM display manager.
The only thing that has changed is now during boot up I have an additional screen that I never had before, but I still can’t boot into my Cinnamon desktop. The new screen is like a lock screen that says “Linux-UZKE.” Other than that additional lock screen, which I would like to eliminate, nothing else has changed in my system. I wen to my terminal and entered
|sudo zypper in mdm
|
|
|
but the return indicated that I already have the latest version installed. After that I went into my YAST settings for
/etc/sysconfig
to change my manager to MDM, but I did not see that option in the dropdown list.
At this point I am lost and I would appreciate any assistance. All I want to accomplish is to either;
A. Add a display manager that allows me to boot into either of the two desktop environments.
B. Or eliminate the new lock screen that says Linux-UZKE.
Even though I worked on this all morning, to no avail, right after I started this thread I tried an additional step. I manually entered MDM into the display manger dropdown manager and it booted right into my Cinnamon desktop.
Strange. Unix/Linux systems do not “boot into a desktop”. They boot and when they are set to boot into runlevel 3/graphical, they will have a login screen. Period.
From the login screen a user can chose to login into the DE of his/her choice (if more then one DE is available). But that is not boot. It is login. And the user can logout and login again, and more users can login, even at the same time. All without the system having to boot.
And when you want to install a DE, use YaST > Software > Software Management and choose for the Patterns Tab. Scroll down at left and there are patterns for several DEs. Select them and install.
I installed the cinnamon desktop using YAST 2, but I do not get an option at start up to choose from different desktop environments. I can edit the display manger and next time I boot up I go straight to the desktop environment that I chose in YAST, but there is no screen to choose different DEs.
First,
You have to boot to the login screen which means you have to disable “automatic login.”
You can do this easily in the Yast module “/etc/sysconfig editor”
Drill down to your Desktop options, find the automatic login screen and remove the name, leaving the field blank.
After that,
You can reboot.
When you reach the login page where you enter your Username and Password,
You should see dropdown menus somewhere on your screen, it won’t always be at the bottom (placement depends on the Display Manager you’re using). Find the menu that specifies your Desktop, select that, enter your password and you will log into your chosen Desktop.
Thanks for all of the replies. I am still working on it and I hope to accomplish this soon.
As a note. I really love the KDE desktop, but I thought that I would experiment with adding an optional desktop simply as a learning experience. So far this little excursion has been fun and educational.
So here it goes, another attempt and the I will report back.
OK, I disabled auto-login and the boot up process did not change. I still do not see a drop-down menu to choose between my different desktop environments. Right now I am back in KDE because I changed that this morning by editing the display manger in YAST from MDM to gdm.
When I boot into openSUSE I do get the Linux-UZKE screen where I have to enter my name and password, but at the bottom of the screen there is only a little box that is called X-Console. In X-Console it says “console log for Linux-Uzke.” That is all I get. But like I said, I can use both desktops, and I prefer the KDE desktop, it is just that I would like to figure this out.
Sounds like xdm which is used as fallback if the selected DM cannot be started.
You switched to gdm in YaST, but did you actually install it?
Other, Qt based options would be kdm and sddm, the latter is actually used as default if you choose “KDE” during the installation. The former is KDE’s own displaymanager from 4.x.
But again, switching in YaST is not enough, you need to install it too (if it’s not installed already).
Btw, that “Linux-UZKE” is your hostname, not a “screen”.
Thanks guys. I tried LightDM and kdm, and neither one gave me an option at the sign in screen to change my DE. I really like the screen that comes up with Light DM, so I will continue using that for now when I want to boot into my KDE desktop. I will just edit YAST to MDM when I want to boot into my Cinnamon desktop.
Thanks for the help and I am still open for suggestions.
For kdm you need to click on the icon in the bottom left corner, then a menu will pop up where you can choose to which desktop session you want to log into.
I can’t tell you at the moment where it is in gdm exactly, as I don’t have it installed.
And even though I never used it, I’m quite sure that lightdm offers this choice as well.
Thank you for your persistence and your encouragement. Using the Light DM display manager, I finally found the menu to choose my DE, it is in the upper right hand corner. It was not an obvious thing and that is why I did not see it at first. The first icon is to choose power options, the second is used to choose language, and right next to those two very obvious icons is a very small icon that resembles a wrench. Clicking on that allows me to choose my different DEs.
On a side note. After clicking on that tool icon it appears that I am using the Plasma desktop. I do not think that this is accurate because I never installed the Plasma DE, I only installed the KDE during initial installation and then yesterday I installed the Cinnamon desktop. But the little drop-down menu showed a little mark by Plasma and no mark by KDE. I find that odd.
Well I am off to explore this phenomenon some more, I will report back.
It’s not odd really.
“Plasma” is the name of KDE’s desktop since 4.0, 10 years ago…
“KDE Plasma Workspace” is just an alias that’s still shipped in openSUSE to avoid breakage on upgrades, but “Plasma5” is the proper name of a KDE desktop session. Both point to exactly the same thing though, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
Again, thank you for the information. As you can tell I am truly a novice when it comes to all of this. I actually am using openSUSE more and more everyday even though I am multi-booting. I have 3 different SSDs installed in my old computer and openSUSE has a 250 gb SSD all to itself. I think that after doing a lot of distro hopping that openSUSE seems to be the most user friendly and complete distro that I have installed.
One important factor with me choosing a long term and everyday distro is access to information and a friendly, helpful forum to help me out, and openSUSE has that in spades.
