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Jamsiemac

Member

Registered: 2026-06-04

Posts: 4  

Changing the login manager in excaliber.

Hi All,

I am trying to change the login manager but after I do Devuan will not load it.

I installed lightdm and ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm or slim, does not matter, change the login manager to lightdm.

After I reboot, it stops on the shell prompt to login. I login and run startx but it give me a message saying the it cant load because slim is not the default login manager.

Ran the above command, restored slim and disabled the heed login manager default from its true state and it still will not load.

I checked the /ect/init.d scripts and other than the heed, I cant see any reference that might stop lightdm from loading.

I even removed slim and it still wont load lightdm.

This is not normally such a hard task but this one has me stumped.

Im running latest excalibur with openrc init.

Sorry bud I need to change it because slim sends me over the edge.

Normally you are just able to change the manager using dpkg but this is just bizarre.

I am in the sudo group and it happens even when I am running as root as well.

It has me perplexed and makes no sense to me.

F_Sauce

Member

From: Noreg

Registered: 2017-07-07

Posts: 97  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

Hei.
I'm not sure, but might help if you explain how you installed the whole system.
I have four functional systems running Excalibur with KDE; three with SDDM and one with LightDM, I have, actually, also swapped and fuddled around with them, can't remember having issues on my side.

Cheers,
Olav

---

I'm on Devuan with KDE

Jamsiemac

Member

Registered: 2026-06-04

Posts: 4  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

Thank you for the response. I ended up just installing the cinnamon desktop in the end to get lightdm. I am using the desktop iso. Then I installed the Budgie desktop but I still had an issue with it defaulting to cinnamon. It would not save the last selected session, even when I had set the user session in the lightdm.conf. So to get around that, I removed all the options from /usr/share/xsession dir except Budgie. Then the whole lot freed up and I was able to set everything else under login window.I noticed that under my username even though I am in sudoers will not save and its somehting I have come across before. If I change the brightness, it does not save, if I change the sound, it will not save, if I change the lightdm session. It is a permissions issue from what I can see.

F_Sauce

Member

From: Noreg

Registered: 2017-07-07

Posts: 97  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

Hei again.
Just a wild shot but might be you have to log in as root:

su -

, so to have the ultimate level of permission.
But I have to say that I haven't been experiencing that which it seems like you are doing now.
Budgie seemed interesting though, didn't know about that one.

Olav

---

I'm on Devuan with KDE

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,917  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

To set the default desktop, run as root:

update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

Jamsiemac

Member

Registered: 2026-06-04

Posts: 4  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

Thanks F_Sauce, did the su and even logged in as root too, same thing.

Hi fsmithred, sis that one as well and selected the number of the budgie desktop and ran again to confirm it changed but when I login, it defaults to cinnamon. There is something weird happening with the login manager because I am running the lightdm with xfce and when I select login window from settings, It does not reflect the login window. I went into all light dm conf files because you have created a number of profiles and changed every single one to another image that is located in the images directory but still the default Devuan one is present. I am assuming that the login manager is lightdm for cinnamon. I ran the command to tell me and it says lightdm. I cant change the wallpaper. Additionally grub customizer does not show the wall paper for the background on the grub menu. I changed it manually in /boot/grub. I had none of these issues with Devuan 5. When I install Expirion, I have none of these issues. The only reason im not keeping expirion is because I cant install xlibre which I want.

Jamsiemac

Member

Registered: 2026-06-04

Posts: 4  

Re: Changing the login manager in excaliber.

I did another clean install. Even though I am in the sudo group, I cannot change the lightdm login window background but when I login as root I can. My profile for some reason does not have root permissions which is weird.

I logged in to xfce as root and could change the background through login window in settings but still cant see the grub appearance setting in grub customizer. I think this is because grub customizer is trying to read them in etc when they are located in /boot... I can edit the file anyway. So I basically got what I needed to do. I now have xfce with lightdm, xlibre, customised grub and login manager. I have never seen anything so complicated and I have run alot of distros. Never seen this. In devuan 5, I just added myself to sudoers and could do everything.