The Console Display Manager

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-09 13:50:19

Fed up with the overhead of gdm and kdm, and the instability of qingy and slim, I sat down last night and began working on a project dubbed CDM - the Console Display Manager. CDM is a (relatively) full-featured display manager written in pure bash. But how many features can you put in a bash display manager? Surprisingly, quite a few!

CDM Supports:
*Multiple X sessions (user logins are all handled through tty1)
*Any DE/WM
*Configurable console logins
*Users restricted to a single environment bypass the menu on login
*Root is automatically dropped to console
*Theming
*All settings are configurable on a per-user basis

Granted, this is effectively an alpha release (and the result of a night of no sleep), so let me know if you find any problems or have any ideas!

CDM is in the AUR and the wiki!

Last edited by Ghost1227 (2009-11-09 15:05:32)

zenlord · 2009-11-09 14:32:58

THX- will try it out.

Have you tried lxdm? It is very new and aims to be what slim was until the devs pulled the plug.

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-09 14:35:28

Yep, not good enough yet, maybe someday

hullap · 2009-11-09 15:15:21

a feature request,
autologin

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-09 15:19:30

NOTE: I forgot to add one line of code that handles users trying to bypass the login manager through alternate ttys, I'll add that shortly.

Aedit · 2009-11-09 16:05:50

I just tried it out. Well done, very nice!

Just 118 lines of bash. I am glad someone finally exploded the myth that SLiM is lightweight. I mean, over 4000 lines just for a supposedly lightweight login manager?

bruenig · 2009-11-09 16:10:54

bloat

Barrucadu · 2009-11-09 16:26:19

Nice idea; if I had multiple users I might use it rather than autologin

anonymous_user · 2009-11-09 16:48:18

May someone post screenshots pretty please?

robmaloy · 2009-11-09 19:12:20

very nice!

some cosmetic suggestions:
1. use full paths for executables (/usr/bin/cdm)
2. make it unnecessary to mess with users' files: 'ck-launch-session startx ${xinitrc} -- :${display}" and use /etc/profile.d instead of ~/.bash_profile
(you could create a temporary xinitrc file for that)
3. replace "bash" with "$SHELL"
4. exit the shell at tty1 after starting X

edit:
hm i guess 4. doesnt work

Last edited by robmaloy (2009-11-09 19:38:56)

knedlyk · 2009-11-09 19:47:12

Cool!!!!!
Here is screenshot:
http://omploader.org/vMnFldw
tMnFldw

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-09 19:48:29

robmaloy wrote:

very nice!
some cosmetic suggestions:
1. use full paths for executables (/usr/bin/cdm)
2. make it unnecessary to mess with users' files: 'ck-launch-session startx ${xinitrc} -- :${display}" and use /etc/profile.d instead of ~/.bash_profile
(you could create a temporary xinitrc file for that)
3. replace "bash" with "$SHELL"
4. exit the shell at tty1 after starting X
edit:
hm i guess 4. doesnt work

Good suggestions! I'll look into that, but it should already exit tty1 after starting X... least it does for me

ilembitov · 2009-11-09 22:45:45

Wow, that's great. Really.

Aedit · 2009-11-09 23:25:11

If you use fbterm (http://code.google.com/p/fbterm/) you could have a background image I guess.

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-10 00:24:06

robmaloy wrote:

2. make it unnecessary to mess with users' files: 'ck-launch-session startx ${xinitrc} -- :${display}" and use /etc/profile.d instead of ~/.bash_profile
(you could create a temporary xinitrc file for that)
3. replace "bash" with "$SHELL"

Implemented (I think)

Last edited by Ghost1227 (2009-11-10 00:24:41)

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-10 00:33:06

And it works!

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-10 00:41:15

If anyone writes custom themes for CDM please submit them. The two I threw together aren't going to keep everyone happy.

robmaloy · 2009-11-10 08:51:55

csm-profile.sh is still sourcing ~/.bashrc

hmm i wonder why exiting tty1 didn't work for me.
i also had to "exit" twice to logout when running console

gonna check that later today

Andrwe · 2009-11-10 10:42:34

Sounds very interesting.
I like qingy but the framebuffers are a pain.
So I'll try cdm directly after arriving at home. *knuckles cracking*

Ghost1227 · 2009-11-10 11:41:33

robmaloy wrote:

csm-profile.sh is still sourcing ~/.bashrc
hmm i wonder why exiting tty1 didn't work for me.
i also had to "exit" twice to logout when running console
gonna check that later today

Thanks, fixed

robmaloy · 2009-11-10 16:24:53

everything working like a charm now <3

Andrwe · 2009-11-10 17:36:26

I don't know if you'll like it but I've added a manual how you can get commands like shutdown in the menulist to the wikipage.
And I've updated the part "Configuring CDM".

Andrwe · 2009-11-10 18:00:29

I've found a bug if you start an X session the session isn't started in a login shell that causes loss of e.g. umlauts for german keyboard layout (öäüß).
As a fast solution I've changed in /usr/bin/cdm

exec ck-launch-session startx /usr/share/cdm/xinitrc -- :${display} &> /dev/null &

into

exec ck-launch-session bash --login -c startx /usr/share/cdm/xinitrc -- :${display} &> /dev/null &

But this solution is bash dependent.

Arm-the-Homeless · 2009-11-10 21:17:58

Aw. I had this idea forever ago. Never got around to it.

Nice job. I'm probably going to start using it in place of SLiM.

eldragon · 2009-11-10 23:02:43

nice work. gonna test it right now..

im reading the wiki, and found out the config file is in /etc/cdmrc, since everything is being migrated to /etc/name.d/something shouldnt cdm use the same hierarchy just for consistency? or am i missing something else here?

anyway, just cosmetics

EDIT: and....im back..... bravo. gotta love the simplicity!

im not sure if this was thought of yet, but maybe it source a per user config that should override the global one, instead of having the special settings in /etc/cdmrc, there should be a ~/.cdm/ dir with user settings.

Last edited by eldragon (2009-11-10 23:13:16)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-09 13:50:19

The Console Display Manager

#2 2009-11-09 14:32:58

Re: The Console Display Manager

#3 2009-11-09 14:35:28

Re: The Console Display Manager

#4 2009-11-09 15:15:21

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