Switching Display Mangers In Ubuntu

I recently installed the KDE 4 packages for Kubuntu, just to give it a whirl.  Since I’m not really much of an eye-candy guy I lost interest pretty quickly.  I’ll get to know it more as time permits, but right now isn’t that time.  So I jumped back over to KDE 3.5.

One problem (and I use that word loosely), however.  I quickly noticed the KDE 4 display manager (KDM) was now installed and being used as the default.  This really isn’t so much of a problem as a “what the heck were they thinking with that background” kind of thing.  Now I certainly could have just changed the background for the KDM, but where’s the fun in that?

So to change back to the KDE 3.5 KDM we open Konsole and run the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm

That command will launch a console-based configuration window much like this:

KDM Configuration Screen

From here we just select the display manager we want to use.