Vanilla sway install - login manager

ARM Sway
1

Hi there,

I decided to install sway wm from the manjaro minimal interface. I am having problems with setting a display manager. I decided to try greetd-gtkgreet; however, I ended up booting up into an unusable environment repeatedly. I am using the arch greetd wiki + the greetd webpage. The code snippets provided there take me to stage where I get either sway errors or blank screens.

I am considering to use another alternative display manager if I can’t use greetd. Ly seems a good alternative. If I can’t setup greetd, is there any chance I can install Ly from the command line? I don’t have pamac handy; so I need to do from AUR via command line.

Thank you for any help.

2

use " man 5 greetd"

that’s the autologin in setup i use.

3

I found the man page below:

The page is for agreetry; whereas I have been trying to use gtkgreet. So, I thought there are significant differences. The man page doesn’t require any specific sway profile in /etc/greetd either.

I can use agreety as well if this works well? It seems to have a simpler setup than gtkgreet.

A second problem is logging out from the sway environment. I understand that manjaro sway spin is using wlogout in combination with gtkgreet. Can I do the same with agreety or maybe another manager like Ly or Gdm.

In case I switch to Ly, I will need to setup AUR, which will require installing a helper like yay. So, I am hoping to install what is available in Manjaro repositories.

4

Just adding to my previous post, it seems I have four choices in case I do not want to setup AUR:

  1. I do not install a display manager and autologin with a few code liner on my .bashrc.

  2. Use greetd; I assumed gtkgreet would be what I need. But it seems agreety can be used as well?

  3. Gdm

  4. Sddm

I am wondering how I can manage the logout process. The default logout in Sway offers just logout to either display manager or to bash shell. I want to be able to shutdown, restart or suspend/lock the laptop without opening a terminal or going back to the display manager/bash tty.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

5

wlogout will work for that.

6

Ok great. I just broke the sway again. I have the impression gtkgreet needs more scripts than what is available in the info/wiki pages.

I will try agreety next time. Or I can just skip installing the login manager completely and open sway directly for the time being to concentrate on setting up sway.

Do I need to create a greeter group when I set it up or is it already available? I have accepted the defaults in setup but it seems I may need to add my account to greeter group as well.

7

All customizations we did for the sway profile you can find here: overlays/sway/etc · master · manjaro-arm / applications / arm-profiles · GitLab. Feel free to copy/paste what’s needed. Specific packages from the default repos (no aur) are listed here: editions/sway · master · manjaro-arm / applications / arm-profiles · GitLab. Not sure why you want to go that route instead of starting with the sway edition directly though as most of the hurdles might be solved already in it…

1 Like
8

Hi,

Thank you so much for the elaborate answer. I love the Manjaro sway edition and I used it for a while. I find it very enjoyable. There are two reasons I am doing this and torturing myself:

  1. Chromium-widevine: I am not a fan of drm content and I want my system to be free of drm content for time being. For entertainment I am using alternatives like tubi.tv which is more than enough for me.

  2. A previous issue that I have reported on file permissions and ufw firewall is still persisting on Manjaro Sway edition. To elaborate, I downloaded and installed Manjaro Sway manager (21.06) from the manjaro.org website. Installing ufw gave me warnings on file permissions on /usr directory. The symptom also persists on Manjaro XFCE edition and KDE editions. Only Manjaro Minimal and Mate editions are free of this problem as of the 21.06 release. The forum thread is below:

You can try downloading and installing the Manjaro Sway, XFCE, or KDE edition and reproduce the symptom yourself. I am currently on Manjaro Mate. I brewed my own Manjaro XFCE from Manjaro minimal. Now I want to do the same with Sway, which is my favorite environment as of now.

If you can fix the issue, which is ufw complaining on uid with 1001, on Manjaro Sway Edition, I would be the most eager to use it. I feel like reinventing the wheel again right now. And it is very time consuming for me.

I guess Chromium-widevine issue can be resolved by uninstalling the scripts, which I don’t know how to; so, I might need your help.

Can you fix the Manjaro Sway Edition symptom on file permissions?

9

I want to add to the issue number 2 above. I decided to try the Manjaro Gnome edition from:

I didn’t check the gpg signatures and such as it is time consuming for a test. I directly burned to a micro sd. Booted into gnome. Issued

$ ls -al /usr

The command output directories which are owned by a mix of root and user 1001. The /usr directory was supposed to be owned by root only–I assume same is valid for the / file ownership.

This shows Manjaro Gnome Edition needs to be fixed for file permissions as well. I see that Gnome is coming with ufw and gufw, which is great. If you enable ufw and issue

$ sudo ufw status verbose

You will have a warning from ufw on the command line about file permissions.

I really liked the gnome edition too btw. Just this problem is making me hesitant to use it on a daily basis.

I am still on the Manjaro Mate Edition. Mate is not my favorite environment; nevertheless it is doing the job.