Display manager
The display manager has a few jobs on the system, but most of us know it as the program that creates the graphical login screen. If you want a
really light system, of course, you can forego the display manager altogether and just run startx from the terminal prompt. For those who want a real login screen, there are a few lightweight options:
- XDM is simple, no-nonsense, feature-free, and ugly as sin. Still, if all you care about is logging in to a desktop, it does the job, and without a lot of outside depenencies or tedious setup. XDM is provided by the xdm package.
- WDM, or the WINGs Display Manager, improves feature-wise on XDM with niceties like a session menu, actions menu, help. It still looks a bit like 1998 warmed over, but it’s light on resources. Thewdm package provides this.
- LightDM is a modern, themeable display manager with all the goodies you expect from a modern login screen. While it was initially designed for use with Ubuntu’s Unity, it has no desktop-environment-specific dependencies and makes a good DM for any desktop. The lightdm package provides it, and you’ll also need to choose a greeter package; go with lightdm-gtk-greeter as a good default.
- Slim is a no-nonsense display manager with no desktop dependencies. It’ very popular on a lot of lightweight distros, but was removed from some past Debian releases for unsolvable security issues.
- NoDM is not really a display manager, but a set of configurations that obviate the need for a display manager and take you straight to the desktop. Use this if you don’t care about things like security or switching user accounts.
KDM and
GDM are the display managers associated with KDE and Gnome, respectively; I don’t recommend them on a lightweight system simply because they have too many dependencies with their associated desktop environments (neither of which are appropriate for an old PC).
Finally, if you want something between a stark console login and a full-on X11 display manager,
qingy is a framebuffer-based login that can fire up terminals or X sessions. Configuring it requires working framebuffer support and a bit of init-system plumbing, but it’s a nice way to add a bit of sprucing to an old system while keeping startup minimal.
