SDDM in tty1 by default

Maximiliano Curia maxy at gnuservers.com.ar
Fri Sep 16 06:17:53 UTC 2016


Hi,

I've used sddm in tty1 for a while to test it out (this was sometime ago, 
things could have changed since). And there were a couple of things that 
bothered me.

 - If you start a second session it tries to use tty2. This might slowly eat
   all your vts, but more importantly is that together with the next issue it
   breaks the second session support.

 - It failed to start the display if the current tty is "busy". By busy, it
   could be that getty was activated there is a user logged in that vt, etc
   (using systemd the getty is not running till you switch to that terminal)

   In the systemd service file we have:
   # Change this if you want to start sddm in a different tty
   Conflicts=getty at tty7.service
   After=getty at tty7.service

   That means that in order to use a second session we would need to first
   allocate tty1 and tty2 in the service file.

 - Logging out shows getty, kills it, then starts sddm. This is probably
   something related to the systemd internals, and the mentioned getty rules.
   It's only a minor delay, so it could be ignored, but it stills annoys me.

This was tested using systemd, using a sysv-init, you'll probably need to 
either edit the inittab or the sddm configuration. Otherwise you'll probably 
experience a restarting loop (which can only be fixed remotely)?

So before making the switch I would suggest to test this use cases in sddm.

Also, as a side note, I'm currently running sddm 0.14, but it has an ugly 
change regarding the way it handles the themes.

Now it embeds the 'maui' theme (which is now named the empty string theme), 
and falls back to that if something failed.

In previous versions, if you had a theme installed and no configuration file 
it would just use that one.

In this version (without the breeze patch) without a configuration file, it 
uses the maui theme regardless of what other themes you have installed (so 
you'll need to create a sddm conf file to use breeze).

With the breeze patch, if you have the breeze theme installed it uses breeze, 
if you don't have breeze installed then it starts with maui with an error 
message, if you want to use another theme you'll need a configuration file.

If you have a configuration file using 'maui', then it starts in error mode, 
as 'maui' is no longer present, you need to say Current=
in the Themes configuration.

The lxqt team complained about this breeze theme dependency in the past and 
again the irc channel when we discussed about this new 'feature' in sddm.

So far, I'm skipping 0.14, hoping that 0.15 fixes this use case (they are 
supposedly adding a configuration dir that might help deal with this issue).

Happy hacking,
-- 
"When explaining a command, or language feature, or hardware widget, first
describe the problem it is designed to solve."
-- David Martin
 Saludos /\/\ /\ >< `/
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