A question that is regularly asked is how to remove some entries in the session menu (shown on the screenshot below). The standard session menu has 7 sessions. If you want a DoudouLinux for very young children, you may wonder how to remove the two most advanced sessions, Mini and Whole DoudouLinux. On the contrary the first 2 or 3 sessions are quite useless if your children are bigger.

GDM session menu (Chinese)

The solution is to enter the session Whole DoudouLinux and open a console. Because the session menu is based on GDM, the tool that will allow you to hide sessions is “gdmsetup”:

$ sudo gdmsetup

In the latest tab you can add or remove users in the list of users who are not shown in the menu:

gdmsetup – user's tab

Of course changes are lost after shutdown or reboot if you have not installed DoudouLinux on hard disk or if full persistence is not set. The session names to be used in the order of session difficulty are:

0gamine
1pysycache
2childsplay
3tuxpaint
4gcompris
5doudoulinux
tux

The resulting session menu with “5doudoulinux” and “tux” removed is the following:

GDM session menu modified (Chinese)

So everything is OK but you may have noticed that a problem occurs if you want to change the sound volume or to make removed sessions reappear: you do not have access to the required tools anymore through the remaining sessions… The solution is simple: just type the name of the Whole DoudouLinux session user, which is “tux”, then press Return. This is shown in the following screenshot:

GDM type user name (Chinese)

To conclude there is just one thing to add: it would be better to have a small but nice interface to set the session menu. Be patient, this will come!