SDDM -- KDE's next display manager

[SteveRiley]

Looks like the Blue Shell folks are packaging SDDM for us now...think I'll give it a try.

https://launchpad.net/~blue-shell/+archive/sddm

[ronw]

Any luck SteveRiley?

Here:

Setting up sddm (0.0+git20140429+r431.7~ubuntu14.04.1) ...
/etc/init.d/sddm: 82: /etc/init.d/sddm: Syntax error: ")" unexpected (expecting ";;")
invoke-rc.d: initscript sddm, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package sddm (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2

[SteveRiley]

dpkg threw an error during the installation. The file /etc/init.d/sddm contains a missing ;; in the last case selector. That was an easy fix; then sudo dpkg --configure -a finished the setup.

This is not integrated with dpkg-reconfigure, so I manually edited /etc/X11/default-display-manager to be /usr/bin/sddm. Then I rebooted. SDDM appeared, but after I typed my password, Plasma never started. I switched to a TTY and changed /etc/X11/default-display-manager back to /usr/bin/kdm and rebooted. SDDM still showed up! I purged the SDDM packages and rebooted. Now no display manager appeared at all. Had to run sudo apt-get install --reinstall kdm && sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm to restore order to my universe.

The SDDM wiki has a page for Ubuntu, with the following instructions:

// Don't forget to modify "/etc/X11/default-display-manage" with the path of the sddm executable (should be /usr/local/bin/sddm).
// Last, backup your "/etc/pam.d/sddm" PAM profile, and copy a lightdm or gdm (non tested with gdm but should also work, since lighdm PAM config is adapted from GDM first) PAM profile. Rename it "sddm". You should end up with gdm or lightdm profiles untouched and one "/etc/pam.d/sddm" file that is a perfect, unaltered copy of your current working display manager.
// Save all of your works. Switch to a tty (Ctrl-Alt-Fn where 'n' is 1 to 6). Stop your current display manager service with "sudo service mydisplaymanager stop". Finally, run "sudo sddm".

I don't have either of those recommended files. I may try again, but using /etc/pam.d/kdm. If that doesn't work, perhaps extracting the file from the LightDM package would work. Fun fun.

[SteveRiley]

Any luck SteveRiley?

To fix that, you need to make an edit to /etc/init.d/sddm. Add the highlighted line in the screenshot below:

Then run sudo dpkg --configure -a. But there's still more work to do, as you can see in my earlier post.

Also, there may be a lot more required to get this working. Take a look at what Jonathan Riddel mentioned about Fedora's efforts so far:

For a full system to log into Plasma 2 with Wayland it needs a login manager that supports it, currently only SDDM. Quintasan has the trello item to look into this. Asking David (the lightdm-kde author) today he said..
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: Fedora are trying out SDDM in a KDE4 world next release. It is rather problematic (read, really really problematic)
with complex setups.
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: I'm watching it, will be interesting to see what Red Hat do.
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: they have someone working on it, I did some KDE5/ Plasma 2 stuff on top of SDDM
13:40 < d_ed> but it's largely portable.
13:40 < d_ed> For Plasma2 I think we may end up going SDDM as default.

"Really really problematic"? Doesn't sound too good. Maybe waiting until Plasma 2 and Frameworks 5 is the right thing to do.

[ronw]

Thanks for finding that. Yeah, I think I'll wait.

[SteveRiley]

Copying the various files into /etc/pam.d didn't help. There must be something else missing in the scripts that hand off control from SDDM to Plasma.

[NickStone]

Here's a link to a wiki page for Manjaro that has SDDM available in its repos (also available in Arch repos as well). https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?t..._Managers#SDDM I am posting the link to show you what sddm looks like.

I think a better link would be this one https://github.com/sddm/sddm as you can actually download the source code and build it yourself.

Happy compiling!