Acronym for the Gnome Display Manager, gdm(8)

A complete rewrite of xdm(1)?.

It's the bit that displays the graphical login screen on a GNOME machine.

GDM (at least for version 2.4.0 and later) in Debian completely ignores your default language/encoding settings, even though the "locales" package sets up the LANG variable in the /etc/environment file. The package maintainer argues that this file is only supposed to be used by PAM, so in the meantime nothing is done. Great.

The best workaround so far is to add

auth required pam_env.so

into /etc/pam.d/gdm so that the LANG variable gets set to your system's default.

Another method is to add the line

LANG=`grep ^LANG= /etc/environment | sed -e "s/^LANG=//"`

to /etc/init.d/gdm, although this is less tidy IMHO.

See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=147091 and the thread containing http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2003/debian-gtk-gnome-200309/msg00084.html.

(This was fixed in gdm 2.4.1.7)