The display manager is waiting in the background, and when the start-up script exits, the display manager takes control and displays your log-in screen again. Once you exit your desktop (by using an option like “Log Out” or “Restart”), the desktop’s processes will all shut themselves down, and when they’re all done, the start-up script knows it can exit as well. The start-up script will remain running as long as you’re using the desktop. For example, in a KDE environment, the display manager doesn’t care about all the background processes – it only needs to run the script “ startkde“.

Once you log in, the display manager will start one application or script, which will in turn start a number of other programs, scripts, and processes. When the system starts, a display manager will run automatically… this is why nowadays you’re greeted with a nice graphical log-in, rather than a plain old command prompt on start-up. It’s useful to understand a little about how the log-in process works in Linux GUI’s.

Start-up your new Virtual Machine and configure to taste.

Create a Virtual Machine with your favorite OS installed (MTE has covered installing both Windows and Mac OS X previously).

The initial steps you’ll need to take are: We’ll be using VirtualBox for this article, but you should be able to adjust the concept if you’re using another VM application (it will just need to have the ability to start a VM from the command-line).

How to use virtualbox in ubuntu