XDM (in full, the X Window Display Manager) is the default display manager for the X Window System. It is a bare-bones X display manager. It was introduced with X11 Release 3 in October 1988, to support the standalone X terminals that were just coming onto the market. It was written by Keith Packard.

Because of its lack of configurability, users of GNOME, KDE or Enlightenment tend to use GDM, KDM or Entrance instead of XDM.

References

• Linda Mui and Eric Pearce, X Window System Volume 8: X Window System Administrator's Guide for X11 Release 4 and Release 5, 3rd edition (O'Reilly and Associates, July 1993; softcover ISBN 0-937175-83-8)
• XDM(1) manual page (XFree86.org)

External links

• xdm manual page
• Taming The X Display Manager
• Configuring XDM — a graphical login interface for Linux or UNIX (Mark Nielsen, Linux Gazette #43, July 1999)

X display managers | xdm