Great, I don't know if you caught it, but I had a typo in the last
line of my patch, leaving out the l in xdmctl. I've attached a
revised patch that fixes that, does away with escaping the ':' in the
file names (I'm not sure whether that's an improvement) and adds a
note to be careful when shutting down sessions, in line with your
comments below.
On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 02:00:51PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> ok, applied.
>
> > For Oswald, or other KDE'ers, I'd also like to suggest this
> > information be incorporated into the kdm manual. Currently it has no
> > mention of reserve.
> >
> there are two reasons for this. the first one is the constant lack of
> somebody capable of updating the doc in a useful way. the second one
> is, that the reserve display feature is only semi-official as of now - i
> want proper desktop integration (gui for switching displays in kicker,
> kdesktop and kdesktop_lock), and an interactive "shutdown protection" in
> kdm to prevent users from nuking forgotten sessions.
>
Good ideas. Most of the things you talk about really a relevant to
any situation with more than one virtual terminal, whether or not
reserve is used.
--- README 2004-05-06 23:04:54.000000000 -0700
+++ README.new 2004-05-07 10:17:18.000000000 -0700
@@ -93,13 +93,26 @@
This is not perfectly suited for Linux, as there X-Servers don't actually
cover consoles (gettys), but hey, it works. :-)
* reserve. A server marked as reserve is not started at KDM's startup time,
- but when the user explicitly requests it. See "Command FiFos" below.
+ but when the user explicitly requests it. If there is a reserve
+ specification, the KDE Menu will have a "Start New Session" item
+ near the bottom; use that to start kdm's greeter on one of the
+ reserved screens. The display will switch to the new screen, and
+ you will have a minute to login. If there are no more available
+ reserved screens, selecting the menu item will have no effect. For
+ finer control, see "Command FiFos" below.
Example:
:0 [EMAIL PROTECTED] /usr/bin/X11/X vt7
:1 local reserve /usr/bin/X11/X :1 vt8
+Note that changes to Xservers will not take effect until you do a kdm
+reload, and your KDE menu won't change until you start a new session.
+Be careful: if you restart rather than reload kdm you will terminate
+your own session.
+
+If you have multiple sessions for any reason, be careful not to shut
+the system down without closing them all.
Configuring session types
-------------------------
@@ -181,7 +194,9 @@
This is a feature you can use to remote-control KDM. It's mostly intended
for use by ksmserver and kdesktop from a running session, but other
-applications are possible as well.
+applications are possible as well. You can write to these files from
+an application or by using, for example, the shell echo command.
+
There are two types of FiFos: the global one (xdmctl) and the per-display
ones (xdmctl-<display>).
The global one is owned by root, the per-display ones are owned by the user
@@ -220,7 +235,10 @@
"reserve" [timeout in seconds]
- Start a reserve login screen. If nobody logs in within the specified amount
of time (one minute by default), the display is removed again. When the
- session on the display exits, the display is removed, too.
+ session on the display exits, the display is removed, too. Direct
+ the reserve command to your current session's Fifo. So if session
+ 0 is your standard login session and 1 is reserved, send the
+ reserve command to xdmctl-:0. Once it executes, it creates xdmctl-:1.
"suicide"
- The currently running session is forcibly terminated. No auto-relogin is
