cdm: xdm, gdm, kdm … cdm!

Now here’s something you don’t see every day:

cdm is a display manager tied to the console. Imagine the immense savings in system resources and drive space by relegating the mundane task of display manager to a text-based tool, rather than a gob of graphical gizmos.

cdm has been around for a while — a long while really, considering it was first announced way back in 2009. That makes it rather frosty to some folks. If you can’t handle software that wasn’t written in the past three years, that’s okay with me. It’s your world.

Configuration is fairly straightforward, but might take a little effort to get aligned properly. Copy the rc file at /etc/cdmrc to .cdmrc and you can probably work on it for a while and get results.

Keep in mind that there are three different sections that will require your additions, and if the entries don’t correspond correctly, you’ll end up starting wacky stuff at the wrong time. I was wondering why I kept starting the console when I selected “blackbox and X,” before I realized I had to encapsulate the entry with quotes. You’ll get the hang of it.

cdm is terrific on a lot of points, but the best reason I can think of to use it is it reliance on dialog … and not much else. I know the AUR package lists things like xorg-xinit as dependencies, but I think if you ran a strict console-only system you could get away without those. (I have dialog installed already on my Arch system, because I use netctl‘s wifi-menu fairly often.)

The only real downside to cdm is … that it relies on dialog and little else. 😕 To be honest, on a one-user, one-desktop system, I have little need for cdm, since I can just hot-wire the system to autologin and jump to X or a command prompt.

And since I gain nothing and lose nothing by adding cdm, it really only represents a small added step to the boot process. It’s terrible to say it, but in a one-man/woman, one-desktop arrangement, cdm is actually a tiny inconvenience.

On the other hand, if I used a system that was primarily text-oriented and occasionally relied on a graphical environment, or perhaps a graphical environment that was slanted heavily toward text (think: tiling window manager), then cdm is a nifty addition to an already sparse system that won’t add an ounce to your present setup.

And so we’re back to where we started: Imagine the immense savings in system resources and drive space by relegating the mundane task of display manager to a text-based tool, rather than a gob of graphical gizmos. 😉