Lightweight display manager for xfce?

[Auke Kok]

On 05/26/2011 11:07 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On jeu., 2011-05-26 at 20:22 -0700, Auke Kok wrote:
>>
>> if you always login to the same user, try uxlaunch - a `login-less`
>> login manager. uxlaunch supports consolekit/pam and that's what is
>> needed to get your xfce logout/shutdown buttons to work on most
>> distro's.
>>
>> http://meego.gitorious.org/meego-os-base/uxlaunch
>
> Note that I've quickly tried uxlaunch on my Debian. It might be related
> to some integration lacking, but it failed to use consolekit properly.

[snip]

> All in all, it was seducing even for a desktop box if only one user, but
> it's not usable for me.

I'm paid by Intel to write/maintain uxlaunch for MeeGo.

I'm obviously willing to merge patches from people who care about 
uxlaunch for one or more of the following:

- non-MeeGo distributions
- non-Intel hardware support (e.g. ARM, sparc, etc.)

But, you can imagine that it's outside of my current work to spend too 
much time on debian integration. (as a matter of fact, the last time I 
ever installed a debian system is over 7 years ago).

Now, that said:

 > Another issue is that uxlaunch will try to run stuff
 > in /etc/xdg/autostart and .config/autostart (even when hidden=true)
 > while xfce4-session already takes care of that, and I don't think you
 > can disable that behavior in either of them.

This was fixed in uxlaunch's git yesterday.

 > Note that I've quickly tried uxlaunch on my Debian. It might be related
 > to some integration lacking, but it failed to use consolekit properly.
 >
 > When running directly startxfce4 or xfce4-session, it won't start the
 > consolekit daemons.

console-kit-daemon needs to be running before uxlaunch starts. It's up 
to the ConsoleKit packager to assure it's running before uxlaunch starts.

of course, systemd should start it on-demand for you if you're lucky 
enough to use that.

 > When using the (debian specific) /etc/X11/Xsession (which runs scripts
 > in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ like the consolekit one, then startxfce4),
 > consolekit is started but the session is *not* marked as local (same
 > thing as slim or xdm for example). Note that libpam-ck-connector *is*
 > installed.

xsession.d is a rather obsolete (cough, you may disagree) way of 
starting stuff. In the future, pretty much all shell code will be 
extinct and with X11 going away in favor of things like wayland, there's 
really no reason for me to support xsession.d script fu when desktop 
files are all you need (and even those may just become obsolete...)

Now, that probably pisses off some debian people who claim they really 
really need it, but, uxlaunch isn't for those type of desktop users 
anyway ;)

Anyway, I realize that uxlaunch probably doesn't work for every one or 
every distro (especially those that build heavily on 20-year old 
desktop-isms).

People that use uxlaunch include:

- fedora's meego UX is started with uxlaunch
- XBMC developers are using it to start xbmc on IPTV boxes
- obviously meego

If you have time, you know where to send patches ;)

Auke