Once upon a time, there was a small program called gdmsetup that allowed you to fully set-up the graphical login manager. For reasons that it would be too long to explain here, I wanted to enable the XDMCP protocol in my workstation's gdm and… surprise: gdmsetup now is just a single, small, almost useless window…

So, being Ubuntu the "Linux for human beings", how are human beings supposed to enable XDMCP? Editing a configuration file, like we old people used to do. Perfect!!! Let's check: /etc/gdm contains a custom.conf that is the place where you are supposed to write your custom configurations. Ah, it references a sample file, good! What? It doesn't exist??? 😦 And no useful man page?

OK, I have no problem in configuring services by editing a configuration file, that's what I do for living after all 😉 But what about leaving some documentation around to let us human beings learn what to do? Must we really trust Google for things that the Operating System itself should provide?

By the way, it turns out that the [xdmcp] section in custom.conf should look like this:

[xdmcp]
Enable=true
DisplaysPerHost=2

Thanks peppertop, thanks Google, and… $ubuntu– 😦

Update: It turns out that I am very lucky that I was running Ubuntu Karmic, since the GDM that ships with Lucid doesn't support XDMCP at all…

I am starting investigation for my new Linux distro of choice…