Advice on lightweight display manager

[theYinYeti]

Hi! It’s been a long time… I’m glad to see that ianw1974, spinynorman, AussieJohn, arctic, paul, tyme, etc. are still around :-)

 

I’ve just finished migrating my sister-in-law’s PC from Mageia 2 to Mageia 4(.1 I guess…), and I wanted to revert her full-gnome3 UI to something lighter on resources because she has a low-spec Zotac miniPC, and all was very slow, with occasional freezes.

 

I decided to switch her to Mate, or Xfce if there is a problem with the former. For the DM, I installed lightdm-gtk-greeter (which pulled lightdm itself). Considering Mageia’s roots in the automagic Mandrake/iva, I expected lightdm to just work after I switched to it from GDM in the Control Center. But it did not, and I’m hard-pressed to find out exactly why :-/

 

So, does anyone know what I could have overlooked, having been an Arch user for the last 7 years or so? Or, knowing Mageia better than I do, would you recommend another lightweight DM?

Note that my sister-in-law is a very basic user, who would not even know how to launch a program that she has never used before. So the DM must be user-friendly and stable, not experimental, and once configured, it should keep working after upgrades (so again, not beta software).

 

Thanks!

 

[offtopic]How has it been here these last few years?[/offtopic]

[ianw1974]

Lightdm is good, but does require a bit of configuration. I found this out not so long ago on my Gentoo installation, when I was trying to sort out something because of issues trying to emerge gdm, and didn't want Gnome3.

 

Here's a good link with some info:

 

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Display_Managers

 

note there says about lightdm being usable in Mageia 3 and higher. Maybe it will help. I've tried lightdm and lxdm because I was attempting to build a system with LXDE but also have at least a pretty display manager. If I remember to get on my Gentoo system later tonight, I'll take a look at my config and see what special stuff there I configured. Was a while ago, so can't remember exactly what I did with it, or even what DM I'm using now.

 

Incidently, lightdm is in use with the latest Ubuntu's, and works straight out of the box - as does pretty much all stuff with Ubuntu. Just in case you want an alternative to check out.

[theYinYeti]

Hey Ian! Thanks for replying ;-)

 

For the record, the problem was that lightdm did not have permission to write to /var/log/lightdm, which was owned by root. This command solved the issue:

chown lightdm /var/log/lightdm

'later!

 

Yves.

[ianw1974]

Glad you got it working :)