What entrance do: open session with pam User can choose the WM to open Admin can make a script who are called to open session (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc) Everything can be configured in elsa.conf You could put an customized icon for your user in /var/cache/elsa/users/(username).edj with groupname "elsa/user/icon" to enable grub2 reboot feature use --enable-grub2 on configure. But you need to add this line 'GRUB_DEFAULT=saved' to /etc/default/grub build and install: ./autogen.sh --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr make make install on debian (ubuntu) you need to overide the pam file. cp data/entrance.debian /etc/pam.d/entrance