I've been trying to configure Linux with KDE for use as a Mythtv server for a few weeks now and am slowly making progress but have been unable to figure out how to change the font size on the login screen.

I've installed multiple versions of Linux over the past few weeks trying to find one that's stable on my system with the ATI driver installed. I've had the small font problem with Kubuntu 9.04, Kubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10.

I've finally settled on Kubuntu 8.10 and installed it with all updates. My machine has an ATI graphics card, a quad core AMD processor and I'm using a 1080p television as a monitor.

The default font on both the login screen and the KDE desktop were initially too small to read, even 6 six inches from the screen. I was able to change the DPI setting on the KDE desktop, but the login screen still has the microscopic font. I'm running the ATI driver, but this problem occurs with the standard driver too.

I've changed the desktop size in xorg.conf as well as making various other changes to the xorg.conf file I've seen mentioned online. These changes result in either a corrupted screen or no change at all.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

You will need to run the following command, then you should be able to change the font and its size on the general tab of the window that appears:

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sudo kcmshell4 kdm

You may need to restart X, or reboot for it to take effect.

Thanks for the response. I changed the font size on that page and it doesn't have any effect unless I also remove the check from "Used themed greeter" box.

When I remove the check mark and don't used th themed greeter, the font settings can be changed only for some parts of the login screen, but not for the pull-down menus on the login screen. These remain too small to read from any distance.

Are there controls somewhere for the pull down menus?

Hmmm.... that appears to be a bug in KDM. Please file a bug report ( if one does not already exist ) at bugs.kde.org.

You could alternately try and alter the default DPI of X, which should fix the problem. Unfortunately, I do not know how to do that.