Hello together,

I've installed Slackware-13.37 on an older laptop. It's the old Laptop of my friend and it is planed that her children use the laptop for Internet-surfing and homework.

I want to boot the machine into runlevel 4, but when I configure for XDM I don't have a button for "shutdown" or "reboot".

It is not possible to install KDE on the old machine.

Is it possible to configure XDM (or SLIM) in a way that it behaves similar as KDM, with such buttons. I want normal users to shut the machine down similar as a Windows-machine because they are (not yet) Linux-users.

Thanks in advance

Markus

deleted

You might be better off with gdm, should be a bit smaller and avoid having to install half of KDE and qt stuff...

It's available in slackbuilds.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well, does GDM have many dependencies? I think the Gnome-stuff would run better on the old machine than the recent KDE packages with the qt-stuff.

I'll have a look at Slackbuilds.org for GDM, thanks for the answer.

Markus

Maybe this instruction is usefull: http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/XDM/Customization

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello caravel,

thanks very much, it works with gdm. The only package I had additionally to install due to dependencies was libgnomecanvas.

@Hannes Worst: I had found this document in the Gentoo-wiki already, I will look at it again later.

Markus

Glad you got it sorted.

I achieved this by adding a "shutdown" button to wbar that runs sudo shutdown -h now (after adding the command to the sudoers file.

For users (guest) who I don't want to have this capability, the shutdown button merely logs the user off.

Just an alternative. For all the old laptops and desktops I've installed for average users (read: No Linux knowledge), I just instruct them to briefly press the power button when they want to shut the machine down. This will initiate the shutdown scripts (if the "button" kernel module has not been blacklisted from loading). Of course, I advise them to close all their software before closing the machine down.

As I mainly use fluxbox, I found it too much hassle to install extra apps and modify permissions for a full shutdown button. Pressing the power button on the computer achieves the same, a lot simpler. At least I couldn't think of any disadvantage with this approach.