Open New Session in KDE 3.3.1 on Gentoo (or other Distros)

Many people may remember the “Start new session” button in the “K” menu from ~3.1ish timeframe. Did you ever wonder where it went? This feature didn’t go away. It was just turned off by default. So, to bring the feature back, you have to reconfigure the session manager to use more than one session if you want it.

How do I do this, you ask? Well, I was asking the same questioning. After a few failed attempts at using the right search terms, I finally found a page that brought this to light. First off, I use Google. The term that brought me to the answer is “kde add session.” Where I ended up was here. This is a help page for those who use Fedora and want this functionality back.

I will quote the page, in case of a broken link, but I encourage you to go there and read for yourself, as there are many more tips that may apply to your situation:

2004-03-08 Fedora Tips 50:
I discovered how to get the Start New Session option to work under KDE 3.2 under Fedora. I happened to discover this while I was trying to fix a problem on one of my machines which runs Debian unstable. This was tested on Fedora Core 1 with all of the available updates and KDE 3.2 from www.kde.org.

Normally, when you log into KDE, there isn’t an option to start a new session on the K Menu (right under the Run Command…). You need to be root and you have to cd to /etc/X11/xdm. Next, copy Xservers to Xservers.bak in case you make a mistake. Then chmod +w Xservers since it isn’t writeable normally. Don’t forget to change it back when you are done. Next, you have to edit Xservers.

Here is the original version that came with Fedora…

#
# Xservers file, workstation prototype
#
# This file should contain an entry to start the server on the
# local display; if you have more than one display (not screen),
# you can add entries to the list (one per line). If you also
# have some X terminals connected which do not support XDMCP,
# you can add them here as well. Each X terminal line should
# look like:
# XTerminalName:0 foreign
#
:0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X

and here is my edited version

#
# Xservers file, workstation prototype
#
# This file should contain an entry to start the server on the
# local display; if you have more than one display (not screen),
# you can add entries to the list (one per line). If you also
# have some X terminals connected which do not support XDMCP,
# you can add them here as well. Each X terminal line should
# look like:
# XTerminalName:0 foreign
#
:0 local@tty1 /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp vt7
:1 local@tty2 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :1 vt8
#:2 local@tty3 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :2 vt9
#:3 local@tty4 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :3 vt10
#:4 local@tty5 reserve /usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp :4 vt11

You can uncomment out the other lines to have more sessions available. I don’t know if this will cause problems for GDM or XDM as I haven’t personally tested them. Plus, I believe you have to be running KDM and KDE for this to work.

As you can see, its just a small edit. I can vouch that this actually works. Here’s the Gentoo difference - instead of finding and editing /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers you edit the same file under /usr/kde/3.3/share/config/kdm. The rest is the same. If you log out and back in, you shoul have a new “Start New Session” option in your K menu.

Many thanks to Krishnan Subramanian of FedoraNEWS.ORG for writing this tip.