Andrea Olivato’s Blog

Slim is a lightweight graphical login manager, for those who don’t know it’s something like GDM and KDM, but a bit less stressing for your hardware, very simple, minimal, easily customizable and skinnable. Also slim can be used with any Desktop Environment and got no heavy dependancies.

Fluxbox, well I hope you all have at least heard something about it, is a great lightweight window manager, that combined with a good filemanager (I prefer pcmanfm), its own panel, a light dock (using simdock here) and a bit of vim can became the right choice for any use.

Together…well you’re completely free from any Gnome,Kde influence and you got a nice and fast Desktop Environment.

For fluxbox installation and configuration there are a lot of guides. Here are my favourites for Gentoo and Ubuntu.

To install slim just use your distribution package manager. For example I did

# emerge -avt slim

or in Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install slim

After installin open slim configuration

# vim /etc/slim.conf

and around line 54 you will find your sessions array. Just delete sessions you don’t own or don’t want to use and then set as first session

startfluxbox

We do use the start script as doing this we will be able to use the ‘startup’ script into the .fluxbox directory to start our own apps on DE booting.

Now that slim is configured you can choose to follow the white rabbit or not. If you want to, follow those passages to disable gdm/kdm and start using slim instead.

On Gentoo just change the configuration file of Xdm

# vim /etc/conf.d/xdm

replacing your current variable ‘DISPLAYMANAGER’ from any previous value to

slim

On Ubuntu (and I believe on all the debian based) remove GDM from startup and add slim

$ sudo update-rc.d -f gdm remove
$ sudo update-rc.d slim defaults

Now just logout from any grafical interface and from your shell restart the Login Manager

On Gentoo

# /etc/init.d/xdm restart

While on Ubuntu

$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop && sudo /etc/init.d/slim start

Everything  should work fine, and you should be able to login to your fluxbox desktop. To change session just press F11 while writing your username/password!