lightdm, greeter, screensaver and user switcher

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boruch
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Dec 23, 2016 3:08 am

lightdm, greeter, screensaver and user switcher

#1 Post by boruch »

Hello everyone. New user here, with a report of what seems to be some trouble in how MX has integrated lightdm, and some parts of solutions. I'm writing this from memory based upon my install at the beginning of the week (I was put off from writing because of viewtopic.php?f=65&p=402499#p402499).

1) user switching has been correctly modified from the xfce menu, but not from the xfce panel widget

2) xscreensaver is selected as the default screensaver, but it isn't configured properly. My memory is that part of the problem was that the daemon wasn't being set, that option "lock screen after..." wasn't set, and that "blank after" wasn't set. (this ties into issues with light-locker, below)

3) light-locker should be set to autostarted with options --lock-after-screensaver=1 --no-late-locking --lock-on-suspend

4) the script /usr/bin/xflock4 needed to be modified to have "dm-tool switch-to-greeter" as the first item iterated over in the loop "for $lock_cmd in"

5) I remember that the default settings for xfce power manager were "curious" and needed some basic tweaking.

6) The script that was ported to the xfce menu "switch user" icon gives users the bad advice of the option to use Ctrl-Alt-F7/8/etc. The reason that this is bad advice in the current release is that the packaged version of lightdm includes a "punitive" feature for users who do so - Instead of immediately responding with a greeter screen, lightdm first presents a lock screen with a punitive timeout. A much better solution would be to define a custom keybinding for "dm-tool switch-to-greeter" and have the script message recommend using that.

I think that those changes pretty much covered all of the scenarios for me, and might help others have a smoother MX-16 experience.

For your consideration / comment /etc.

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Jerry3904
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Posts: 21881
Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2006 6:13 am

Re: lightdm, greeter, screensaver and user switcher

#2 Post by Jerry3904 »

Thanks. Some quick reactions:

1) I don't understand which panel widget you mean, and the Xfce repo shows nothing like that.

2) We have a thread going on Xscreensaver in the Dev Team's forum already. We had problems with it during development and there are complaints all over the web.

3) We don't ship with light-locker installed.

4) No clue...

5) Make an actual suggestion we can evaluate--"curious" is merely a subjective reaction. Our settings are based on development testing aimed, like the distro itself, at being as stable as possible.

6) I just tested it on a clean install and it reacts as expected. AFAIK no one has had problems with this.
Production: 5.10, MX-23 Xfce, AMD FX-4130 Quad-Core, GeForce GT 630/PCIe/SSE2, 16 GB, SSD 120 GB, Data 1TB
Personal: Lenovo X1 Carbon with MX-23 Fluxbox and Windows 10
Other: Raspberry Pi 5 with MX-23 Xfce Raspberry Pi Respin

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dolphin_oracle
Developer
Posts: 19925
Joined: Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:17 pm

Re: lightdm, greeter, screensaver and user switcher

#3 Post by dolphin_oracle »

boruch wrote:Hello everyone. New user here, with a report of what seems to be some trouble in how MX has integrated lightdm, and some parts of solutions. I'm writing this from memory based upon my install at the beginning of the week (I was put off from writing because of viewtopic.php?f=65&p=402499#p402499).

1) user switching has been correctly modified from the xfce menu, but not from the xfce panel widget
are you talking about the "action buttons" plugin? I see it doesn't work...any idea how to configure it?
2) xscreensaver is selected as the default screensaver, but it isn't configured properly. My memory is that part of the problem was that the daemon wasn't being set, that option "lock screen after..." wasn't set, and that "blank after" wasn't set. (this ties into issues with light-locker, below)
I hate xscreensaver...everyone should donate money to that guy so he can improve it again. I know that sounds backwards, but it needs fixed.

the daemon is crashing constantly is the main issue. happens right after login for a lot of people. we are working on it, but frankly its very frustrating. and for some reason, people still want screensavers. seriously, just blank the screen with the dpms people!
3) light-locker should be set to autostarted with options --lock-after-screensaver=1 --no-late-locking --lock-on-suspend
we will keep this note handy should we every default to light-locker for locking, thanks. this has been discussed...
4) the script /usr/bin/xflock4 needed to be modified to have "dm-tool switch-to-greeter" as the first item iterated over in the loop "for $lock_cmd in"
why? this one is upstream from xfce.
5) I remember that the default settings for xfce power manager were "curious" and needed some basic tweaking.
maybe...we don't do anything when we close laptop lids. I think that's the only change from upstream. there were a lot of problems in testing with suspend, so we went with the lowest common denominator.
6) The script that was ported to the xfce menu "switch user" icon gives users the bad advice of the option to use Ctrl-Alt-F7/8/etc. The reason that this is bad advice in the current release is that the packaged version of lightdm includes a "punitive" feature for users who do so - Instead of immediately responding with a greeter screen, lightdm first presents a lock screen with a punitive timeout. A much better solution would be to define a custom keybinding for "dm-tool switch-to-greeter" and have the script message recommend using that.
perhaps this is related to your use of light-locker, because my 2 users switch instantly. no delay at all.
I think that those changes pretty much covered all of the scenarios for me, and might help others have a smoother MX-16 experience.

For your consideration / comment /etc.
Thanks for your in-depth comments! They are quite useful!

d.o.
http://www.youtube.com/runwiththedolphin
lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - MX-23
FYI: mx "test" repo is not the same thing as debian testing repo.

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