I had this same problem, tried all sorts of stuff in kdmrc with no luck... Since nothing worked I decided to look at the kdm sources. Found out that the greeter part of kdm wants to run as user "nobody". If it doesn't find that user the list won't get populated. So try adding "nobody" to your system. example /etc/passwd entry: nobody:x:999:999:Nobody:/dev/null:/bin/false * Tommi *