13.2.1. Elección de un gestor de pantalla
The graphical interface only provides display space. Running the X server by itself only leads to an empty screen, which is why most installations use a display manager to display a user authentication screen and start the graphical desktop once the user has authenticated. The three most popular display managers in current use are gdm3 (GNOME Display Manager), kdm (KDE Display Manager) and lightdm (Light Display Manager). Since the Falcot Corp administrators have opted to use the GNOME desktop environment, they logically picked gdm3
as a display manager too. The /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf
configuration file has many options (the list can be found in the /usr/share/gdm/gdm.schemas
schema file) to control its behaviour while /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults
contains settings for the greeter “session” (more than just a login window, it is a limited desktop with power management and accessibility related tools). Note that some of the most useful settings for end-users can be tweaked with GNOME's control center.
13.2.2. Elección de un gestor de ventanas
Since each graphical desktop provides its own window manager, choosing the former usually implies software selections from the latter. GNOME uses the mutter
window manager, KDE uses kwin
, and Xfce (which we present later) has xfwm
. The Unix philosophy always allows using one's window manager of choice, but following the recommendations allows an administrator to best take advantage of the integration efforts led by each project.
Para los equipos más antiguos, sin embargo, es más complicado ejecutar entornos gráficos de escritorio pesados. En estos casos, debería utilizar una configuración más ligera. Gestores de ventanas «ligeros» (con una pequeña carga) incluyen: WindowMaker (en el paquete wmaker), Afterstep, fvwm, icewm, blackbox, fluxbox u openbox. En estos casos, deberá configurar el sistema para que el gestor de ventanas apropiado tenga precedencia; la forma estándar es cambiar la alternativa x-window-manager
ejecutando update-alternatives --config x-window-manager
.