I realized today that Fedora 15 doesn’t expose a UI for selecting another xsession by default – you can only log into Gnome 3. Thankfully, once you install another window manager, then the selection widget does appear; however, it was not clear how to add a WM that wasn’t packaged with Fedora.

In my case, I wanted to run the latest development version of xmonad. (Queue about an hour of fruitless Googling.)

Eventually, I broke down and yum install fluxbox‘d to get an example. After that, a repoquery --list fluxbox gave a list of the files installed, and pointed me to /usr/share/xsessions, which contains the list of WMs that the Fedora greeter uses to present options.

Adding a new option is as simple as creating a new desktop file in that directory, and pointing the Exec field to the binary of your WM.

eg:

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$ cd /usr/share/xsessions/
$ cat xmonad.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=XMonad
Comment=Tiling window manager
Exec=/home/creswick/development/xmonad/cabal-dev/bin/xmonad
Type=Application