Saturday 6 October 2012

Downgrading GDM to version 2.20 on CentOS

Sun Ray Server Software requires GDM <= 2.20. Unfortunately contemporary (i.e. up-to-date) Linux distros do not offer outdated GDM. However GDM is surprisingly easy to build from source on CentOS.


Step 1: Get GDM 2.20 source

wget http://download.gnome.org/sources/gdm/2.20/gdm-2.20.11.tar.bz2
tar xf gdm-2.20.11.tar.bz2
cd gdm-2.20.11


Step 2: Edit gdm-2.20.11/daemon/gdm-net.c


Change

#define MAX_CONNECTIONS 15

to

#define MAX_CONNECTIONS 100

(Prevents GDM from hanging when all your Sun Ray terminals connect)


Step 3: Install dependencies

su
yum install audit-libs-devel \
 libglade2-devel \
 libart_lgpl-devel \
 libgnomecanvas \
 libgnomecanvas-devel \
 librsvg2-devel \
 dbus-glib-devel \
 popt-devel \
 gnome-doc-utils


Step 4: Configure and make a dirty install

./configure
make
make install



Step 5: Logout and test

gdm --version
GDM 2.20.11


Leave a comment if the above didn't work. This was done on a CentOS 6.3 64-bit machine.

2 comments:

  1. I tried this but it didn't work. I rebooted the machine and the OS did not finish booting. I had to rescue the installation. I'm using Centos 6.3 on a 64 bit (dual Xeon processor).
    I then tried
    yum remove gdm (to remove 2.30)
    then install using your instruction, but got the same results.
    Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe check your log files in /var/log, it's kind of hard for me to suggest anything since your problem can be caused by a multitude of problems.

    ReplyDelete