Mini-Greeter

A minimal but highly configurable single-user GTK3 greeter for LightDM.

Inspired by the SLiM Display Manager & LightDM GTK3 Greeter.

Goals

Eventually this is will present a more customizable interface:

• Randomized Background Wallpapers
• Configurable language/session info? (lightdm provides this already?)
• Hotkey to cycle between DE/WM sessions
• Handle GdkDisplay's monitor-added & monitor-removed signals

Open Feature Requests

Current Status

Right now you can:

• log in
• hide the Password: label & customize the text
• hide the password input's cursor
• set the password masking character
• set the size of the login window, the font, & every color
• set a background image
• use modifiable hotkeys to trigger a shutdown, restart, hibernate, or suspend

Install

Arch Linux

Install the lightdm-mini-greeter package from the Arch User Repository:

yay -S lightdm-mini-greeter

Gentoo Linux

Emerge the lightdm-mini-greeter package:

emerge x11-misc/lightdm-mini-greeter

NixOS

Enable & configure the greeter & default session in your configuration.nix:

{
    services.xserver = {
        enable = true;
        displayManager.lightdm.greeters.mini = {
            enable = true;
            user = "your-username";
            extraConfig = ''
                [greeter]
                show-password-label = false
                [greeter-theme]
                background-image = ""
            '';
        };
        windowManager = {
            default = "awesome";
            awesome.enable = true;
        };
    };
}

Then rebuild & switch your configuration with nixos-rebuild switch.

Debian

Debian packages for the latest stable branch are available on the Releases page.

You can use debhelper to build the package yourself:

sudo apt-get install build-essential automake pkg-config fakeroot debhelper \
    liblightdm-gobject-dev libgtk-3-dev
cd lightdm-mini-greeter
fakeroot dh binary
sudo dpkg -i ../lightdm-mini-greeter_*.deb

Note: on Ubuntu, you need liblightdm-gobject-1-dev instead of liblightdm-gobject-dev.

Manual

You will need automake, pkg-config, gtk+, & liblightdm-gobject to build the project.

Grab the source, build the greeter, & install it manually:

./autogen.sh
./configure --datadir /usr/share --bindir /usr/bin --sysconfdir /etc
make
sudo make install

Run sudo make uninstall to remove the greeter.

Configure

Once installed, you should specify lightdm-mini-greeter as your greeter-session in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. If you have multiple Desktop Environments or Window Managers installed, you can specify the one to start by changing the user-session option as well(look in /usr/share/xsessions for possible values).

Modify /etc/lightdm/lightdm-mini-greeter.conf to customize the greeter. At the very least, you will need to set the user.

You can test it out using LightDM's test-mode:

lightdm --test-mode -d

Or with dm-tool:

dm-tool add-nested-seat

Note: If you've added a background-image it will appear in this preview, but it may not appear during normal use if the file is not in directory which lightdm has permission to read(like /etc/lightdm/). A symlink into this location won't work.

Keyboard layout

If your keyboard layout is loaded from your shell configuration files (.bashrc for example) then it might not be possible to type certain characters after installing lightdm-mini-greeter. You should consider modifying your Xorg keyboard configuration.

For example for a french keyboard layout (azerty) you should edit/create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf with at least the following options:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
        Option "XkbLayout" "fr"
EndSection

Config file in $HOME

You may wish to include your config file in their your home folder/dotfiles so it is version controlled & easily transferable between systems. This is possible, but on most systems, LightDM will not be able to read the configuration file due to permission errors.

The proper way to handle this is to loosen the permissions on your home directory a bit.

Start off by adding the lightdm user to your user's group:

sudo usermod -aG $(whoami) lightdm

Allow your user group to read your home directory:

chmod g+rx ~

Move the mini-greeter config file:

sudo mv /etc/lightdm/lightdm-mini-greeter.conf ~/.dotfiles/mini-greeter.conf

And then add a symlink pointing to the file in your home directory:

sudo ln -s ~/.dotfiles/mini-greeter.conf /etc/lightdm/lightdm-mini-greeter.conf

And finally log out & restart LightDM:

sudo systemctl restart lightdm

If LightDM fails to start back up, check the greeter's log file(usually at /var/log/lightdm/seat0-greeter.log) for the following line:

Could not load configuration file: Permission denied

If present, your permissions need further adjustment. You can test your permissions by attempting to read the file with sudo:

sudo -u lightdm cat ~/.dotfiles/mini-greeter.conf

Contribute

You can submit feature requests, bug reports, pull requests or patches on either github or redmine.

If you like Mini-Greeter, please consider packaging it for your distribution.

Style

• Use indentation and braces, 4 spaces - no tabs, no trailing whitespace.
• Declare pointers like this: char *p1, *p2;, avoid: char* p1;.
• Function braces should be on their own line.
• If/else/while/do should always use braces and indentation.
• Use g_critical for irrecoverable user errors, g_error for programming errors.

When in doubt, check surrounding code.

License

GPL-3