Ok, guys, here we go. First of all, I’m pretty new to oS. Came from Ubuntu.
Being a fan of minimalizm, I did a fresh 11.4 install with minimal server selection. Successful. Reboot. XDM ugly login screen comes up. Filled up the fields, login correct, screen blackout and here comes the login screen again. WTF? What did I miss? >:(>:(
Surely I can exit to console, edit /etc/permissions.local followed by su SuSEconfig --module permissions and use startx, but that’s not a option for me. I want the ****ed xdm login screen start my IceWM session! Period.
Any ideas? Any help is welcome and thanks in advance! 
I would do it (for now) to find out if it’s an xdm or other Xorg issue. You can reverse this permission later. In order to use startx as user, you might have to set the SUID bit to Xorg, so:
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/Xorg
Of course, you can reverse that later too.
Hmm … I was about to say Xorg was SUID on previous openSUSE versions and still is on all other distros. Last time I checked, I guess it was the case in Ubuntu too. Now I just noticed that it has changed under Ubuntu and remember that I had to find out why users could not log in in gdm anymore since last update. You might just have answered my question. 
You mentioned icewm. Does login work with other desktop managers, e.g. kde? If so then the problem is with the icewm setup.
The first thing I actually do about icewm is removing icewm-lite (which is installed by default).
check with:
rpm -qa | grep icewm
and if it doesn’t say:
icewm-default-1.3.6-9.1.xxx
icewm-1.3.6-9-1.xxx
deinstall the package icewm-lite:
zypper rm icewm-lite
It should get replaced by icewm-default, which is already light enough and much better anyway.
Ok, so I chmoded Xorg and started Icewm. But still it’s not a solution, as I cannot startx Icewm from login screen 
I think, the problem with xdm would be that an icewm.desktop session file might be missing then. Make sure there is one in /usr/share/xsessions (provided xdm look for it at this location).
nah, the file is there
Do you have icewm-lite or icewm-default ?
Anyway, you can try to add these two lines to your ~/.profile:
export WINDOWMANAGER=icewm
export WINDOW_MANAGER=icewm
One of them … or both might work.
If it doesn’t, you can try to start icewm from your ~/.xsession file.
icewm-default
export are of no help either.
I don’t have /home/****/.xsession
#
xdm info (pid 1911): sourcing /etc/X11/xdm/Xstartup$
#
/etc/X11/xdm/Xstartup: line 30: /usr/bin/hal-find-by-property: No such file or directory$
#
xdm error (pid 1911): Dbus error: Unable to open session: Unable to get information about the calling process$
#
xdm error (pid 1911): console-kit-daemon not running?$
#
xdm error (pid 1911): session start failed$
#
xdm info (pid 1911): sourcing /etc/X11/xdm/Xreset$
#
xdm info (pid 1778): Starting X server on :0$
are the dbus and console-kit daemons installed/running ?
service dbus status
ps -ax | grep console-kit
Dbus is running (root), console-kit-daemon --no-daemon
I don’t know what’s the problem. I do have icewm and use it when it comes to serious things, most often without any session manager. I checked with xdm on the 11.4 I’m building at the moment and it works. (Un)fortunately my /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession and /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc are too different from the ones installed by default and so I can not help to debug this situation. But if you look in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession, you’ll see exactly what it does. If the file $HOME/.xsession exists - this file doesn’t exist by default, users might create it if they need to - it will start a login shell (the function exec_login) which will execute this file. So I would try to create it in your user home directory and put the command icewm-session or icewm in it, or even twm to see what happens.
If it doesn’t work, you can try to use in ~/.xsession:
exec dbus-launch icewm-session
I haven’t used this hack for a long time and I cannot remember that I ever used it with icewm (but with gnome and xfce on some Unix) … so I don’t know why you would need it. But it looks like the next thing to try. Normally exporting WINDOWMANAGER should be enough though. That’s what I’m doing. I don’t actually set up users ~/.xsession. But if users have one, it has priority (Look at the end of /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession).
You might have missed something in your minimal install.
I woke up this morning with enlightenment! I was reinstalling oS with the minimal server selection and saw the package called “patterns-openSUSE-X11” which I never chose to install. Most prolly, this is the part I’ve been missing every time, right? LOL.
Ok, now, installing the package really did the trick! Issue solved! Thanks for your time and efforts PTY! You were awesome!
Yep you do need the X packages to run any GUI desktop.
# **zypper info patterns-openSUSE-X11**
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Information for package patterns-openSUSE-X11:
Repository: @System
Name: patterns-openSUSE-x11
Version: 11.3-22.1
Arch: x86_64
Vendor: openSUSE
Installed: Yes
Status: up-to-date
Installed Size: 1.0 KiB
Summary: Meta package for pattern x11
Description:
This package is installed if a pattern is selected to have a working update path
zypper info -t pattern x11
shows the list of packages installed with this pattern.