lightdm and gdmflexiserver

[flabdablet]

I'm using Wheezy on amd64 with XFCE and lightdm. I don't want anything to do with gdm3 or any other part of Gnome 3, but I still want to be able to use multiple concurrent desktop login sessions and it seems I need a gdmflexiserver to make that work.

The googles tell me that lightdm is supposed to come with a gdmflexiserver compatibility script (typically installed at /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/gdmflexiserver) but dpkg --listfiles lightdm shows no such thing and apt-file search gdmflexiserver only shows the ones that come in the gdm3 and kdm-gdmcompat packages. So where is the lightdm version hiding?

[flabdablet]

Found one in the lightdm tarball available from https://launchpad.net/lightdm/+download - all that needs to be done to make it work after downloading the tarball to /tmp is

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cd /tmp
tar -xzf lightdm*.tar.gz
sudo cp lightdm*/utils/gdmflexiserver /usr/local/bin

So I'm now successfully switching users with a locally installed, non-package-managed gdmflexiserver. But I still don't understand why the Debian lightdm package doesn't just put one in /usr/bin, or maybe do something clever with /etc/alternatives if there needs to be support for multiple display managers on the same box.

[bangx]

How do you switch user sessions in xfce?

[fsmithred]

ctrl-alt-F1 (or F2, etc.)
login

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startx -- :1

Edit: ctrl-alt-F7 and ctrl-alt-F8 to switch back and forth between desktops. (might be ctrl-alt-F9, if you can find one of the desktops.)

[ectospasm]

How do you switch user sessions in xfce?

This topic helped me to set up xscreensaver so the "New Login" button will now work with Xfce4 and lightdm. That's one way to do it.

Another way to do it is to use xfswitch-plugin, which allows you to click a panel icon to switch to another user. The drawback to this applet is that the screen cannot be locked to activate it.

[Danielsan]

Currently I'm using Jessie with XFCE4.10, I installed gdmflexiserver by installing libgdm1, so now I have the bin gdmflexiserver in /usr/bin.
With this installation I have the button switch user activated but when I click over it I have this pop-up alert:

GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.DisplayManager was not provided by any .service files

I have even added this command in my .xscreensaver config file:

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newLoginCommand: /usr/bin/gdmflexiserver

But never it happened...

So, have anyone idea how it's possible enable this function?

[vimora]

Hi, I have a quick solution.

The problem is xscreensaver doesn't find the file /usr/bin/gdmflexiserver

As root, with your favorite editor create the file /usr/bin/gdmflexiserver
Then put inside the lightdm command: "dm-tool switch-to-greeter"
Finally give execution permission to the file with chmod.

If you want only one code line you can use this in your root console:

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echo "dm-tool switch-to-greeter" > /usr/bin/gdmflexiserver && chmod 755 /usr/bin/gdmflexiserver

This is a quick solution because if you are using another display manager you have to use another command.