Christmas is coming. . .

. . . and it's an old, old tradition that Xsnow gets hauled out.

Of course, it's easy enough to trigger it to run when you yourself log in to an Xwindows session: Just put "xsnow &" in your .xinitrc or .xsession file.

But what about your login screen? After all, that's got far less windows getting in the way, and it can accumulate some impressive snow drifts.

I, of course, use XDM as my login manager, because it's the best. To set up XDM to run xsnow, it's very simple:

cd /etc/X11/xdm
echo "xsnow &" >> Xsetup_0
echo "killall xsnow" >> GiveConsole

Easy as that! From now on, your XDM session will have Santa, Rudolph, Christmas trees and flurries of snowflakes that go away when you log in (If you don't use the third line, Xsnow will run even after you log in)

Xsnow's great. I've even been able to compile it for Cygwin here at work. And it's got lots more options than you might think: You can even run multiple sessions with different-colored snowflakes in each one to make it more colorful (You'll get a warning about the perils of yellow snow if you choose that particular color tho ;o)

There are Windows and Mac versions for you non-Linux users too, so there's no excuse!