GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 155972
gdm doesn't allow you to login to different gnome-session's
Last modified: 2010-06-04 19:45:49 UTC
You can set up different sessions in gnome via the gnome-session-save command. You should be able to specify which session to start via gdm.
Yes, this would be a nice feature. But it should also work with KDE sessions. A freedesktop specification would need to be in place before we could move forward with this.
Mentioned in https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+bug/44074 as well. (Bumping Version.)
bug #324653 is kind of related.
I wouldn't be opposed to adding a feature that makes GDM work with gnome-sessions as long as it works in a way that is GNOME specific. For example, perhaps a drop-down list of sessions to pick only is displayed when the user has actually picked the GNOME session to run. This might be a bit tricky to implement, though, since GDM normally just has "Default" session picked and doesn't really know what session the user will run until the user has actually finished authentication and the session is going to start. Perhaps GDM could display a pop-up dialog after authentication asking the user which session to start? If we go with an approach that works with both KDE and GNOME (and others following a freedesktop specification), it might still be hard to implement since the session names would likely be different for the different environments. It would probably require changing the way the GUI works. For example, perhaps there is a list of all known sessions (KDE ones and GNOME ones) and when the user picks one, this also causes the session to be set to that environment rather than using "Default". Just some ideas of how this could work. I think the best approach would be to work to create a common interface that works with both GNOME and KDE, but I would also consider other approaches if they are well-written and don't make GDM difficult to use for people using GDM to login to sessions that do not support this feature.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.