Mydm

A simple and lightweight display manager for Linux/Unix

Runtime dependent: Glibc, libX11

Compiling dependent: GNU Make, GCC or other c99-supported compilers, libX11-dev (optional), shell, etc.

cd path-to-mydm-src
./mkconfig.sh --enable-xsec
make
sudo make install

• On FreeBSD, you need use gmake instead of make. And if you do not want to install gcc, you can use FreeBSD clang compiler

   gmake CC="cc -I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-lX11 -L/usr/local/lib"
  

• To build a debug version, you can use

   DEBUG=1 make
  

• ./mkconfig.sh --enable-xsec can be replaced by make defconfig now.

Binary Release

mydm has .tar.xz format binary archive and .deb format Debian Package. Go to the release page

Usage

For a simple example, start the Xfce4 desktop on display: 0, the 7th virtual console as a user foo

# mydm -d :0 -v vt7 -c startxfce4 -u foo -n

Greeter mode and XSecurity please see below.

Some commonly used options

-d display         Display name, default ':0'
-v vt              VT number, default 'vt7'
-c program         X client, e.g. 'xterm'
-r program         After run x client, will run it, but do not wait it to exit, default null
-u(-l) username    The user to login, default null (Not login)
-n                 Do not use the su command of system (default used)
-A                 Use MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 XSecurity, See below!
-g                 Use greeter mode (After session exited restart it), See below!
-p pidfile         Create and lock a pid file, default null
-D                 Initialize mydm to a daemon process
-S                 Let X client setsid before executable

Add server options

You can add the additional options to X server. e.g. -depth x, like this

mydm -d :0 -v vt7 -c startxfce4 -u foo -n -- -depth 24

Register mydm as a system service and auto start

For an LSB-supported initialization system, you can register mydm as a system service directly using the following command (as root)

mydm-service-install --target linux-lsb --default

For the specific usage of the mydm-service-install utility, go to this Wiki

About XSecurity

1. Not Authority

   mydm can run X without XSecurity, and this is the default. It is NOT suitable for computers that have multiple users logged in at the same time. But for the personal computer and most of the embedded device is enough.

2. Use MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1

   Tip: If you run ./mkconfig.sh without --enable-xsec at compile time, mydm will not support it.

   You can use -A option to enforce the authority method. For more about MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1, see Xsecurity(7) manpage.

Greeter mode

Mydm supports greeter mode, you can use the -g option to activate the mode

# mydm -c /usr/lib/mydm/mydm-gtk-demo-greeter/mydm-gtk-demo-greeter -g

On greeter mode, when a session exited, mydm will restart it.

So, greeter is usually a gui program, it created the login interface requires the user to enter the user name and password. I wrote a greeter demo, use gtk+, see here

To compile and install it, you can run these in top source directory

make gtk_greeter
sudo make gtk_greeter_install

Cross compiling and building packages

If you want to learn to cross compile this project or build a binary package, please see this Wiki

Set the default X Client

X Client can be set at runtime by cmdline, but you can set a default X client before build

If you do not set it, default X client will be set to 'xterm'

./mkconfig.sh --enable-xsec --default-xclient=startxfce4

Do not want to install libx11-dev (Linux only)?

Warning: it is not suggested! It is better if you install libx11-dev. And you can uninstall it after compiling.

When you compile mydm, libx11-dev may be needed because mydm use some headers of Xlib's. But after compiling mydm, libx11-dev is not needed anymore.

And if you don't want install to libx11-dev in compiling time, you can see this Wiki