Sunday, March 8, 2009

Making Xmonad to show up in gdm session list

I am now for some reason having to use Fedora 10 on my home laptop... partly by choice, partly due to circumstances. As I expected, xmonad is not in yum repos (neither Fedora nor RPMFusion)... but thankfully, ghc and haskell libraries are. Anyways, I found an easy way to install haskell packages once ghc and friends are installed (more about that in a later post... probably). Well, installed xmonad, xmobar, etc. along with gmrun (this was in yum repos).

But now that I have xmonad installed, I needed xmonad to show up in gdm session list so that I could choose it over gnome. I had done this quite a while ago, before I started using debian based distros... so I had to re-learn the process (Xmonad FAQ page made the process trivial). Now that I know how it works, I thought I should blog about it so that I can look it up here again in case I forget again.

Well, after so much blah blah, the process is pretty straightforward. As with most Unixy ways of doing things, you just have to add a .desktop file, say, xmonad.desktop to "/usr/share/xsessions/".
The contents of this file is also quite straightforward:


[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=xmonad
Comment=This session starts xmonad
Exec=/home/sc/.cabal/bin/xmonad
Type=Application


(OK, so you (assuming somebody other than me reads this) probably figured out by now that I used cabal to install xmonad... well, that saves me a blog post I guess :-)

xmonad should show up along with others in your gdm session list.

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