Redhat 8 console sign in desktop display options - wayland X11 classic

Question

In doing an installation of rhel-server-8.8_x86-64.iso on a Dell optiplex 7010 pc and my home pc (asrock) I see what is in the above pic. On a Dell r640/740 server I only see the X11 choices, I do not see the Wayland Display Server choices.

• why do I not see the Wayland choices on my dell r640/740 servers?
• Would the presence of an Nvidia graphics card matter?
• What is this login menu called?
• How does it get created and populated with all those choices?
• How can one modify this menu, specifically to make it only do Classic Wayland display server?
• Can anyone provide a link to any kind of documentation on this?
• Is this specifically a gnome thing?

Answer 1

This question is quite deceivingly hard. It also has different ways to approach it. The RH documentation is surprisingly unhelpful.

First to note is that I have a Debian Bookworm, not a RH8. However, I'll try my best to transpose it to RH8, while leaving the Debian parts for anyone else to see too.

You have three ways to influence what is being loaded.

custom.conf - enable or disable Wayland

1. On Debian it is at /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf. On RH8 it should be at /etc/gdm/custom.conf

In section [daemon] you can disable Wayland by adding:

WaylandEnable=false

User session configuration - default session

2. Second option is to have settings adjusted in your profile at ~/.dmrc (see more at gnome's help pages for [gdm][3] or gdm user session : For example

[Desktop]
Session=gnome
Language=cs_CZ.UTF-8

Checking the gdm source code - the X-GDM-SessionRegisters

3. This option is, I think, the answer to your question. I found it in the gdm-session source code. The answer is to use the 'X-GDM-SessionRegisters' variable in your *.desktop files. These desktop files correspond with the list shown.

The X-GDM-SessionRegisters in the desktop file takes in a true or false. If the value is false the session type should not be shown. The one you want to see should have true others false.

The files can be found at /usr/share/xsessions/ or if you do not have Xorg installed you can use /usr/share/wayland-sessions for Wayland only path.

In my case I have:

ls /usr/share/xsessions/

gnome-classic.desktop  gnome-classic-xorg.desktop  gnome.desktop  gnome-flashback-metacity.desktop  gnome-xorg.desktop  openbox.desktop

I'm not sure if RH8 has the same paths. To what I could find it seems it does.

Edit:

why do I not see the Wayland choices on my dell r640/740 servers?

Hard to say without a log, but probably Wayland was not installed?

Would the presence of an Nvidia graphics card matter?

That should not matter.

What is this login menu called?

GDM session list

How does it get created and populated with all those choices?

You can check the source code I have linked above. It takes the lists of *.desktop files (a the /usr/share/xsessions/) and creates a list from them.

You can try it yourself and create a simple new entry there. For example (example mapped to openbox session):

This should be enough:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=My Nice Openbox session
Comment=Testing if this will create an openbox session
exec=/usr/bin/openbox-session
Icon=openbox
Type=Application

How can one modify this menu, specifically to make it only do Classic Wayland display server?

As I have tried to explain above you can do that with X-GDM-SessionRegisters. If it does not work for you, you can simply move/delete the *.desktop files.

Can anyone provide a link to any kind of documentation on this?

The source code apparently.

Is this specifically a gnome thing?

Well GDM is a Gnome Display Manager so that is Gnome only. You can use different ones like KDM, lightDM, etc. if you want to.

Answer 2

How does it get created and populated with all those choices?

@tukan explained it very well already.
In Red Hat Linux (and its derivatives) it reads all *.desktop files in /usr/share/xsessions/ and /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ and displays the values of the Name parameter in the session list, that you posted above.

If exist, it uses the Name of your locale settings, e. g. in my case Name[de]

$ head /usr/share/wayland-sessions/gnome.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name[de]=Standard (Wayland Anzeige-Server)
Name[es]=Estándar (servidor gráfico Wayland)
Name[fr]=Standard (serveur affichage Wayland)
Name[it]=Standard (server grafico Wayland)
Name[ja]=スタンダード (Wayland ディスプレイサーバー)
Name[ko]=스탠다드 (Wayland 디스플레이 서버)
Name[pt_BR]=Padrão (servidor de exibição Wayland)
Name[ru]=Стандартный (дисплейный сервер Wayland)
Name[zh_CN]=标准（Wayland 显示服务器

How can one modify this menu, specifically to make it only do Classic Wayland display server?

You could remove or rename the .desktop files, that you don't need. If only one is available, there won't even be a menue available anymore.
But I don't know, if they would be restored with some update.

But perhaps it's sufficient for you already, to define your own standard session?
See the Red Hat Documentation on how that works.

Maybe the GDM documentation is of help too

why do I not see the Wayland choices on my dell r640/740 servers?

Are this packages installed?

• xorg-x11-server-Xwayland
• gnome-session-wayland-session
• gnome-classic-session