Package:Lightdm

Lightdm

   Tip

We welcome improvements to this page. To edit this page, Create a Funtoo account. Then log in and then click here to edit this page. See our editing guidelines to becoming a wiki-editing pro.

Lightdm is a light display manager. It's an excellent alternative to gdm, & kdm. Lightdm is used in conjunction with x11-apps/xdm.

Install

root # emerge lightdm

Configuration

Lightdm is configured with /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf, and /etc/conf.d/xdm. By default, lightdm ships with lightdm-gtk-greeter which is controlled by /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf

You'll need to edit the following file to tell the system which display manager to use, and to ensure that dbus is started prior to lightdm. Lightdm will crash if dbus is not running. Change the xdm file to the following:

   /etc/conf.d/xdm - xdm configuration to use lightdm

DISPLAYMANAGER="lightdm"
rc_need="dbus"

If you want the user to type in the username, you can set these options.

   /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf - to make users manually enter the user name

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-hide-users=true
greeter-show-manual-login=true

Note: if you get errors with regards to dbus, comment out (or remove) the rc_need line and add dbus to the default runlevel:

root # rc-update add dbus default

Then invoke Openrc to start the missing services:

root # rc

Passwordless root auto login

You have to have dbus merged with the X use flag. In configuration a few things must be set together in conjunction. slim does not allow passwordless root auto login. This is for building live cds, avoid this on real systems.

   /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf - auto login root without password & force xfce session

[Seat:*]
pam-service=lightdm
pam-autologin-service=lightdm-autologin
autologin-guest=false
autologin-user=root #or any other user you want to automatically log in
autologin-user-timeout=0
autologin-session=xfce #to set xfce4 for example.  gnome can have this left commented out.

Greeters

LightDM will be pretty useless for graphical logins with out the addition of a greeter for it.

For GTK fans:

root # emerge x11-misc/lightdm-gtk-greeter

for KDE fans:

root # emerge x11-misc/lightdm-kde

Or if you prefer a webkit based greeter (x11-misc/lightdm-webkit-greeter):

root # emerge x11-misc/lightdm-webkit-greeter

To start LightDM on boot, xdm to the default runlevel. dbus may already be added, but if it's not, it will be started anyway because we have configured xdm to depend on it (see /etc/conf.d/xdm, above).

root # rc-update add xdm default

If you wish to change the background, you can follow these settings:

For LightDM GTK+ greeter edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf:

   /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf - lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf

background=/path/to/wallpaper/file.png

LightDM should display on reboot, which you may want to do now.

root # reboot