Introducing Slim display manager

What is Slim? It is a simple but yet very customizable display manager which does not have many dependencies. So in other words if you get it as your dm you will not need to worry about all those huge dependency lists coming your way. One other bonus of Slim is that it does not have remote login features which can add some security to your workstation.

Features: You can easily change and modify Slim’s login background and texts by replacing the contents inside Slim theme folders which are found from:

/usr/share/slim/themes

For example: If you use the default theme and want to replace your background image in it do the following as a root or sudo inside a terminal:

mv somebackground.png /usr/share/slim/themes/default/backgrond.jpg

As you can see in the above example I started with a png file and got it renamed as a background.jpg inside the /usr/share/slim/themes/default

Configuring Slim

If you want and need to configure Slim in order to get it working with your session, or get it to autologin or do something else, just open the following file with a text editor as a root or sudo

/etc/slim.conf

Example: sudo nano /etc/slim.conf

Inside the slim.conf files you will find various entries but the most interesting one for the regular user is the session section which is basically a way to identify sessions with Slim. When you press F1 you can navigate through your session name list and choose the one you want from there. If you happen to have only one session installed, like I did in Debian when I was running WindowMaker, then you might not need to do anything except to login. In Arch Linux and many other distributions things did work only after the file .xinitrc was added and made executable with the correct exec variable (See my previous post for more information).

For example something like this can be read from /etc/slim.conf sessions section:

sessions default,startxfce4,openbox,ion3,icewm,wmaker,blackbox,awesome

If you look at the Slim config file you can also see that you can enable things like autologin or alternatively skip typing the username and move directly to password typing (default_user and focus_password variables). If you choose to use another theme (variable current_theme) just make sure it is located inside /usr/share/slim/themes and has the same kind of formating like all the other theme folders so that Slim can actually access it.

Last but not least here is some more information about Slim from the developers home site:

https://github.com/iwamatsu/slim (November 2016: Slim links returns not found)

You can also find plenty of information about Slim and it’s possibilities if you use any kind of search engine.