ASX wrote:If you are sufficiently motivated, please go on, a new display manager is definitely welcome! Especially if it will be a light display manager. I will help, if I can.
To be honest, I don't know if I have what it takes to write a DM. But motivation is certainly not lacking; I've hoped for a DM that suits my needs but so far none has shown up (my wife and I use different keymaps and it would be neat to be able to configure it per user instead of globally; I would imagine that there are more people out there who learned e.g. dvorak but their partner uses the default national layout). So I've thought about this for a while, really. I cannot make any promises other than giving it a try. And since I'm not a programmer it would only be "sysadmin quality", even if I manage to hack something together. But often enough a start is all that's needed to attract at least one programmer to make some improvements. Probably worth the attempt (and surely not wasted time since there's quite a bit to learn along the way).
Thanks for offering help! I'll ping you when I got a bit ahead with it.
Also I think TrueOS has also a made in house display manager, eventually you can look into the code about specific things, like authentication. (And I think also that they eventually might provide tips and help if needed).
Yes, pcdm is nice and has some useful features. But it's Qt which I don't like the looks of and which is completely alien to me when it comes to source code. Still it might make sense to take a look at it.
Even if they are not compatible, I think they implement similar functionality .... should not be a very big problem.
Well, the thing is that I'm not sure if the Python's PAM wrapper will work on *BSD. But I've decided to at least look into this and bought the PAM Mastery book this morning. When I read it, I'll definitely know more about authentication matters (which certainly won't hurt).
angus71 wrote:Hi there,
I'm not sure, but what about the Linux Mint "Slick-greeter" mentioned in that post?
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3254
It seems to be maintained by Clem and his team, perhaps GhostBSD could use this one?
Greetings
Hi angus, thanks for bringing this to our attention! I kind of lost track of a lot of things in the Linux world when I left that community but it's good to know what's going on there. The thing here is that this "Slick-greeter" is not a DM but rather something you can think of as a DM module. When the MATE desktop project formed to keep the old GNOME² alive, they inherited GDM which was a pretty usable DM in the GNOME² days. For their fork they called it MDM or "MATE display manager" but dropped support for it rather quickly. The Linux Mint team picked it up and modified it and people thought that the name was "Mint display manager". Obviously they've dropped it, too, now (I would guess because it's still an old GTK+2 application whereas MATE has migrated to GTK+3 recently and Mint's other official desktop, Cinnamon, is GTK+3 as well) and adopted LightDM.
One thing that's special about LightDM is that the core is toolkit agnostic. To be of any use, however, you need to use a "greeter" which uses a toolkit (like GTK+3 or Qt4) together with the core. Looks like none of the available greeters suits them and so they've forked one and polished it to meet their needs.
The trouble with DMs is not that there aren't enough of them out there. LXDM for example is a fine piece of software that I like a lot when I'm using a Linux box. However... Those DMs make use of some Linux specific functions (we call those Linuxisms) and are thus not portable. LightDM was known to not work on FreeBSD as well, but after reading your post I checked back only to find that it's in ports now (thanks for that impulse)! Looks like somebody was desperate enough to patch it and port it over. I will try it out this evening. LightDM is certainly not the perfect solution but it might be an option for us to get rid of SLiM which is really lacking some fundamental things...