Replace nodm with a custom lightdm greeter

[spanezz]

For a while I haven't been using nodm anymore and so I had no motivation for keeping it up to date with modern requirements on display managers. Anyone who would like to do that is free to carry on nodm's development.

I recently had a need for autologin again, and satisfied it with a simple custom greeter for lightdm. I would like, at some point, to polish it and make a GitHub repo for it, and in the meantime, here it is.

I find this way more sustainable in the long term, as it outsources most of the display manager development issues to lightdm, which already needs to stay on top of it.

[mailinglists35]

I've installed the greeter, it works fine, but how do you make it load user .xsession instead of default openbox?

root     19446  0.4  0.1 301712  7324 ?        Ssl  20:23   0:00 /usr/sbin/lightdm
root     19451  4.6  0.8 201148 30892 tty1     Ssl+ 20:23   0:00  \_ /usr/libexec/Xorg -nocursor :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt1 -novtswitch
root     19464  0.2  0.2 198328  7764 ?        Sl   20:23   0:00  \_ lightdm --session-child 12 15
user1    19469  2.8  0.3 208832 11316 ?        Ss   20:23   0:00      \_ /usr/bin/openbox --startup /usr/libexec/openbox-autostart OPENBOX
user1    19955  0.0  0.0  53488   584 ?        Ss   20:23   0:00          \_ /usr/bin/ssh-agent /bin/sh -c exec -l /bin/bash -c "/usr/bin/openbox-session"

[mailinglists35]

I could not find any way to do this. I have ended up backing up the openbox.desktop file and replace its contents to call /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession instead of /usr/bin/openbox-session

[mailinglists35]

but still would want to do it the clean way. in my lightdm.conf i see a line saying:

#autologin-session=UNIMPLEMENTED

[jcrben]

I think sddm supports autologin as well: sddm/sddm#751 (comment)

[mailinglists35]

but isn't there someone reporting that you need to press a key to login? I need uninteractive automatic login.

[jcrben]

No keypress is necessary if you follow the process at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=SDDM&oldid=510255#Autologin

[piranna]

For reference, https://github.com/spanezz/lightdm-autologin-greeter.