Bernaard.Iceleaf.NET

There are some issues when enabling remote desktop login (XDMCP) in CentOS 5. XDMCP is easy to configure through the gdmsetup utility (System > Administration > Login Screen). For some reason it turned out, that opening port 177 TCP and UDP in the firewall is not enough. In fact I had to turn the firewall off. I have no idea why…

I enabled the Xnest login, which is fancy since you login to a remote computer in a window. This is done by first enabling “New Login” in the System Tool part of Menu Layout (System > Preferences > More Preferences > Menu Layout). When this is enabled, I right-clicked “New Login” in the Menu Layout editor, and selected “Properties”. There I changed the command field from gdmflexiserver to gdmflexiserver -n. “New Login” now appears in the System Tools-menu.

The problem for me was that the nested login did not understand the presence of my Norwegian keyboard. The solution was to change the Xnest settings in /etc/gdm/custom.conf. This is simply done by adding the following line (as one line, of course) in the [daemon] part of custom.conf:

Xnest=/usr/bin/Xnest -audit 0 -name Xnest -geometry 800×600 -xkbmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.no

To activate the changes, run:

gdmflexiserver –command=”UPDATE_CONFIG daemon/Xnest”

And my Norwegian keyboard works in Xnested login! Hooray! You might guess that -geometry 800×600 sets the size of the window.