A Developer's Diary

Apr 14, 2009

Connect to GNOME Display Manager (GDM) using XMing X Server for Windows



The GDM display manager implements all significant features required for managing attached and remote displays.

The GDM daemon can be configured to listen for and manage X Display Manage Protocol (XDMCP) requests from remote displays.

GDM has a number of configuration interfaces. These include scripting integration points, daemon configuration, greeter configuration, general session settings, integration with gnome-settings-daemon configuration, and session configuration.
By default XDMCP support is turned off, but can be enabled if desired.



Daemon Configuration for XDMCP

The GDM daemon is configured using the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file. Default values are stored in GConf in the gdm.schemas file. It is recommended that end-users modify the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file because the schemas file may be overwritten when the user updates their system to have a newer version of GDM.

Note that older versions of GDM supported additional configuration options which are no longer supported in the latest versions of GDM.

The /etc/gdm/custom.conf supports the "[daemon]", "[security]", and "[xdmcp]" group sections


To enable XDMCP Support add the following in custom.conf file

[xdmcp]
Enable=true

[security]
DisallowTCP=false
AllowRemoteRoot=true
Restart X Windows using the command gdm-restart

Connecting to GDM through XMing X Server

Step1: Download XMing X Server executable for Windows from here and install it.

Step2: Launch XLaunch. Select Fullscreen


Step3: Select Open Session via XDMCP


Step4: Enter hostname or ip address


Step5: Click Next


Step6: Click Finish


Step7: You have successfully connected through XMing



References:
1. GNOME Documentation
2. Comparing XDM, GDM, KDM and WDM

2 comments :

Jim said...

I believe that this will not work using recent versions of GDM. At least not the version that ships with Ubuntu. Not sure if XDMCP was intentionally removed or if it's just broken, but quite a few people seem to be having problems with it in 10.04 and later.

Anonymous said...

Can you try installing XDMCP package manually in ubuntu and see if that works

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