no pictures necessary - and the fact that you can’t post pictures is a spam protection measure
find a service to upload to and post the link here … like you did to that video
was a key part of my question
don’t be stingy with your words and description
you probably can, but you didn’t say …
As per your linked video, you installed a different greeter.
Undo what you changed to use that - so you can at least log in.
Then you can work on figuring out how to achieve your desired look - perhaps the webkit-greeter is not even necessary to do that.
It might be this program - or the theme used by it - which is causing your issue.
The video is two years old and things have changed …
You will probably have to learn a little bit to do just that.
Because if you can’t get to you graphical session - because you can’t log in via the misconfigured display manager - you’ll have to rectify the situation in the TTY.
I will know more about that once I know what you did to get where you are now.
And since that probably means watching the video, or at least skipping through it, this will take some time.
… the watching of it as well as finding the time to do so
so: don’t hold your breath for the next few hours
You could, in preparation for easier work in the TTY, install a terminal file manager.
It may look ancient but it will be easy to understand and use and will definitely help you finding your way around without a graphical session
instead of having just the command line to work with.
sudo pacman -S mc
once installed, just type “mc” and enter to start it…
You probably had to edit a few files to configure your now defunct display manager.
Using this terminal file manager, you can do just that same thing to revert the changes.
From what I saw so far, it should actually be easy to get you back to the original greeter so that you can log in again:
start optional content (skip the next few lines if you want):
mc is not needed - but you can use it.
But: you have to run it as root
in order to edit in the /etc directory, where the file you need to edit is
sudo mc
in that case …
But be careful (not scared, just very careful) - because there is no “undo”, no recycle bin …
The even easier way is to use nano (an editor).
first (I almost always do that) sudo cp -a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.backup.today
(so that you have a copy of the “original” file, in case the edit with the unfamiliar editor goes south …)
/end optional content
then:
sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
find the line that was modified to use the new greeter
greeter-session=lightdm-webkit2-greeter
and change it back to what it was: greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter
save the file
quit the editor
then either reboot
or restart lightdm: systemctl restart lightdm.service
btw:
I just confirmed that the lightdm-webkit2-greeter
does indeed not work
not “just like that” anyway
cannot log in when using that
installing lightdm-slick-greeter
and configuring that one and using the same background images that the video used
will likely give very similar visual results
and it will work
He (the video creator) did both a nice and terrible job with his video.
the result looks great - but it is very hard and tedious to follow
especially when you do not really know what he is doing and why
and what certain actions are supposed to achieve.
Imho lightdm is dead. It doesn’t work properly with xfce (as mentioned here). The last change happened 3 years ago, I don’t quite understand why this otherwise outstanding distro delivers it.
lightdm is not light-locker (which you have a problem with) and it is not the lightdm-webkit2-greeter which was a culprit here
it works just fine and ain’t dead
Hi, I changed “greeter-session=lightdm-webkit2-greeter” to “greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter”, but nothing has changed when I enter the password and press enter the program does not respond.
I had you revert what was done in the video, and you said you did what was done in the video.
And I installed that greeter myself to confirm - and reverted it because it did not work.
At least the greeter, the login screen, should now be looking and behaving as it was before you changed that.
Is it?
Lets see what is actually in your configuration file for lightdm:
grep -v ^# /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
This will only print the lines that are not starting with a # mark
the uncommented lines - the ones which are not default.
Thank you so much for your support and help. I will do as you wrote