entrance - An EFL based display manager

This is a fork and current development version. It is ALIVE! IT WORKS! (for me™)

Known Issues

• Settings UI is broken, hidden for now Issue #6

About

Entrance is a Unix Display/Login Manager written in Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). Entrance allows a user to choose a X WM/Desktop session to launch upon successful login. Entrance is alive and working again for logging into X sessions and eventually Wayland sessions!

The project has been resurrected from the dead to live on once again...

History

Entrance is a long story. There has been 2 different code bases and projects both using the name entrance.

1st Generation

There was a project long ago that worked, and went MIA. Copies of the sources for some releases are in some distro repositories. A copy has been obtained via a PCLinuxOS src rpm. Ideally, it would be great to get a copy of the old entrance repo to add to this one for historical purposes. If you have a copy of the old Entrance repository, please open an issue and provide a link. That would be greatly appreciated!

2nd Generation

Sometime later another came along, Michael Bouchaud/@eyoz who renamed his project elsa to Entrance, which is where the current code base came from. It is not known if this was ever completed or worked, but does not function correctly, if it is even usable to log in at all.

The broken, incomplete, unmaintained 2nd Generation Entrance resides in Enlightenment's entrance git repository. A branch may be added to this repository for historical purposes.

3rd Generation

This project is the 3rd generation, fork of the 2nd Generation code base, with a lot of fixes, and initial removal of incomplete and/or broken code. Rather than fix as is, we are looking to replace functionality with new code and finding different ways of accomplishing similar functionality.

This generation is currently in development, and should be usable. Please open issues for any problems encountered.

Build

Entrance presently uses meson build system, autotools has been dropped.

Build using meson

prefix=/usr/share
meson \
	--prefix "${prefix}" \
	--bindir "${prefix}/bin" \
	--sbindir "${prefix}/sbin" \
	--datadir "${prefix}/share" \
	--sysconfdir "/etc" \
	. build
ninja -C build

On most systems you likely need a pam file. Meson will install this file.

cp data/entrance.pam.d /etc/pam.d/entrance

The systemd service file is presently not installed. It may or may not be usable and/or correct. Please see the section on logind/elogind for further information.

Configuration

Most things can be configured in entrance.conf at /etc/entrance/entrance.conf. Some settings may not work. Please file issues for anything that is not configurable or does not work.

Usage

In order to start entrance, you need a system init script or systemd (untested). This may differ based on your operating system. Entrance does not provide an init script at this time, it may not run or work correctly if started directly. Entrance should be invoked via init script or systemd service. There is a provided systemd service file for entrance. It is unknown if this works or not.

Entrance User

Entrance presently starts as root, and then, uses setuid to run entrance_client under the user nobody. This was done via sudo and su for a bit before switching to setuid. Entrance also used to run under the "entrance" user but was changed in this past commit. Inherited design from the 2nd generation.

It may be changed such that entrance runs under its own user, and does not setuid or run under root. This will require creation of a user account and adding permissions for the user for video, etc. It may be possible to accomplish this now, starting entrance under a user say "entrance" by modifying the untested entrance.conf start_user option:

value "start_user" string: "entrance";

You will likely also need to create a directory for entrance, and ensure it has proper permissions. Since entrance will not be running under root, entrance will not be able to correct this, despite having code for such. Expect to see some errors in log file otherwise, along with non-functional entrance. If started as root, entrance will create directories with proper permissions as needed.

Multiple Displays

Entrance supports multiple displays, with the login form residing on the primary display. In some cases this does not work correctly. If using X, you may need to set the following settings in your monitor sections.

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"A"
	Option		"position"	"0 0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"B"
	Option		"LeftOf"	"A"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"C"
	Option		"RightOf"	"A"
EndSection

Without such, only the background will appear. The login form will not appear along with the rest of the UI, and the cursor will be an X. This
likely due to bugs in entrance code. The work around is the previously mentioned monitors section.

logind/elogind aka systemd

Presently not supported beyond build systems, no code written, just a service file. There are plans to support logind/elogind for Wayland and X via D-Bus. Initial work is currently under way. No code has been committed yet. There is no ETA at this time for completion.