Display Manager Services
In order to change the display manager on Void Linux - or any other Linux distro - you need to identify the currently enabled display manager.
Disabling the Current Display Manager
Void Linux only has one ISO available for download with a pre-built display
manager at the time of this post: the XFCE ISO. If you've installed this
version, the pre-assigned display manager is lxdm
. If you installed another
display manager, replace lxdm
in the following command with the display
manager you have installed.
To disable lxdm
, simply remove the service symlink:
Enabling a New Display Manager
If you want to enable a new display manager, you can do so after lxdm
is
disabled. Make sure to replace <new_display_manager>
with your new DM, such as
gdm
, xdm
, etc.
Set Up .xinitrc
Depending on your setup, you may need to create a few X files, such as
~/.xinitrc
. For my personal set-up, I created this file to launch the i3wm as
my desktop.
#!/bin/sh
If you run a desktop other than i3, simply replace i3
with the shell command
that launches that desktop.
Set Up Your Shell Profile
Finally, in order to automatically launch an X session upon login, you will need
to edit the .bash_profile
(bash) or .zprofile
(zsh) files for your shell:
Add the following snippet to the end of the shell profile file. This will
execute the startx
command upon login.
if [ && [; then
fi
Alternatively, you can ignore this step and simply choose to manually execute
startx
upon login. This can be useful if you have issues with your desktop or
like to manually launch different desktops by choice.