Bye bye KDM - welcome ?

[Rog132]

KDE Commit-Digest: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2014-01-12/

Issue 322
12th January 2014 by KDE Commit-Digest Team

This Week...
KDM has been removed.
...
KDE Base
Sebastian Kügler committed changes in [kde-workspace] /:

KDM goes the way of the Dodo.

It's exactly, to the day, 6 years ago that we released "KDE 4.0", while
this is of course entirely unrelated to this commit, let's celebrate
this anniversary with the deletion of kdm from kde-workspace.

Happy anniversary from Barcelona!

The Plasma Team

Plasma 2 / Plasma Team Gathers in Barcelona : http://dot.kde.org/2014/01/24/plasma...hers-barcelona

Logging in

The team also discussed the login procedure. While KDM has reached the end of its lifetime, being a fork of the ancient XDM, there are better alternatives on the horizon. The Plasma developers decided to improve and update the theming of LightDM and SDDM, although neither are currently perfect solutions. LightDM suffers from requirements around copyright assignment, which some developers refuse to sign; on the other hand, SDDM is not yet fully finished in terms of features needed.

---------------------Edit - more links-------------------------

KDE Commit-Digest comments: http://dot.kde.org/2014/02/10/kde-co...h-january-2014

...Not having kdm on top of Frameworks 5 is not an immediate problem (of course one can still use KDM from KDE SC 4.x).

Login Manager Story: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma...ry/027876.html


KDM goes the way of the Dodo: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-works...13dacf0b7dca7f

[blackpaw]

I really hope not - I've been doing a lot of work with qemu/kvm virtulaisation recently, especially via proxomox. And Ubuntu VM's die when accessed via the spice client. It seems to be something to do with lightdm, switching to KDM makes the problem go away.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I too am in the camp of being unwilling to accept the copyright assignment clauses of LightDM.
My work is Mine, period.

[dmeyer]

I really hope not - I've been doing a lot of work with qemu/kvm virtulaisation recently, especially via proxomox. And Ubuntu VM's die when accessed via the spice client. It seems to be something to do with lightdm, switching to KDM makes the problem go away.

Well there is also SLiM and SDDM or even XDM as alternatives.

[blackpaw]

GDM works as well

[dtr]

I too am in the camp of being unwilling to accept the copyright assignment clauses of LightDM.
My work is Mine, period.

I'm curious to know what the copyright assignment clauses you are talking about? I did a quick search, and only found that LightDM is licensed under the GNU GPL 3, and KDM is licensed under GPL. I haven't taken the time to compare the two versions but I can't image they are wildly different.

[claydoh]

Oh, it's the eeville, dreaded, hated, Ubuntu cla that makes the lightdm project harder to contribute to, since it is mostly worked on by Canonical folks. The code is gpl, but the required agreement (in order to be allowed to contribute to the project) allows Canonical to take the code and re-license it, though the contributors keep copyright to their code. Many don't like the idea that this could possibly happen to their work.

[kubicle]

No sane developer (or any of the big companies in the open source ecosystem) will ever (without compensation) sign a CLA that specifically allows Canonical to relicense their contributions as proprietary.

The CLA is what eventually kills all Canonical software projects (like launchpad, upstart, bazaar, unity, mir etc.). If it was just inferior software (which it is), it would usually be fixable with more hands and some actual coding talent (none of which Canonical has in abundance). With the CLA they'll never match the competition or have wide adoption in the linux world.

As far as the KDM removal goes, aren't we (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) talking about the master branch (that is KDE5 with plasma2 and wayland), Many of the DMs written specifically for X are not likely to work on Wayland without extensive rewrites. I'd assume KDM is not going anywhere on KDE4, and we'll need a new one on KDE5.

[SteveRiley]

I cloned their Git repo and built SDDM just now. Even though I changed the contents of /etc/X11/default-display-manager, SDDM would not start. Instead, the computer booted to a text mode login. I could start the display manager with sudo sddm (*). However, there was no sound in the Plasma Desktop at all. The Phonon control panel showed no hardware; only the "Dummy output" was available. I'm not quite sure what to make of this. So back to KDM for now.

(*) Yes, the display manager runs as root. The DM starts the X server, which must be run as root.

steve@t520:~$ [B]ps -ef | egrep 'kdm|X' | egrep -v grep[/B]
root       [COLOR="#B22222"][B]991[/B][/COLOR]     1  0 21:41 ?        00:00:00 kdm
root      1009   [COLOR="#B22222"][B]991[/B][/COLOR]  2 21:41 tty7     00:00:11 /usr/bin/X :0 vt7 -br -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-twsTAb

[kubicle]

I cloned their Git repo and built SDDM just now. Even though I changed the contents of /etc/X11/default-display-manager, SDDM would not start. Instead, the computer booted to a text mode login.

On kubuntu kdm is started by the upstart job /etc/init/kdm.conf. The job checks /etc/X11/default-display-manager whether it is set to /usr/bin/kdm or it will do nothing. So changing just that won't start sddm instead (but will prevent kdm from starting)...you'd need an upstart job for sddm (or start it manually).

[SteveRiley]

Derp! I had a notion in the back of my mind that I would need to fiddle with the Upstart job -- creating an empty /etc/init/kdm.override would have been sufficient. But then I got annoyed about the borked sound and forgot about the Upstart stuff before I wrote my post here. Grrr.

[kubicle]

Derp! I had a notion in the back of my mind that I would need to fiddle with the Upstart job -- creating an empty /etc/init/kdm.override would have been sufficient.

That would override the kdm.conf job, but that isn't strictly necessary as the job just exits if /etc/X11/default-display-manager is not set to kdm:
[ ! -f /etc/X11/default-display-manager -o "$(cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager 2>/dev/null)" = "/usr/bin/kdm" ] || { stop; exit 0; }

One could try copying /etc/init/kdm.conf as sddm.conf and replace all instances of kdm with sddm (the above line, and the "exec kdm" line)

[SteveRiley]

Yeah, I'll play with it again later. Still curious about the no sound bit, too.