X11 Display Manager Sees Its First Update In Seven Years

For those wanting a nostalgic X11 experience this weekend, the X11 Display Manager (XDM) has seen its first release since 2011.

This classic X11 display manager is written against the X Athena Widgets GUI library and has largely been replaced by the likes of GDM, LightDM, and SDDM. Apparently though there still is enough historical interest in XDM that new releases are warranted: longtime X11 release wrangler Alan Coopersmith issued the version 1.1.12 update.

With almost eight years worth of changes, a few dozen commits built up in this time including various build system improvements, support for systemd startup notifications, memory leak fixes, Sed is now used for generating config files, and more.

This release also addresses CVE-2013-2179, a security vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service. This six year old CVE was previously addressed by just a patch to existing XDM releases.

More details on XDM 1.112 via xorg-announce.