SDDM: Lightweight and beautiful Session Manager [Installation in ArchLinux]

SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager) is as its name implies a Session manager to access our favorite desktop. For those who do not know what I am talking about, a Session Manager is the screen that appears when we turn on the computer and asks us for username and password 😉

What is particular about SDDM? Well, it is based on QML and therefore it is quite light and customizable. You can achieve very beautiful themes, such as the one that comes by default and best of all, it has an excellent integration with KDE.

Installation

I remember trying to compile it to debian wheezy but it needed a dependency on a higher library than the one in the repository.

In this case, I was successful installing it on ArchLinux from the AUR:

$ yaourt -S sddm-git kcm-sddm-git

The first installs us SDDM and the second, we install the package to integrate it into System Preferences de KDE.

Due to the restrictions of my ISP I cannot use the port to use GIT. That is why, to "clone" a repository from GitHub I have to change:

git clone git://github.com/sddm/sddm.git

by

git clone https://github.com/sddm/sddm.git

I make this clarification because with the help of Son_Link I had to modify the PKGBuild and for some reason when doing this, it gave me an error in the installation. Everything seemed to indicate that I did not clone the repository from GitHub.

Then, after modifying the Script if I downloaded the repository, but it did not put the folder where the script needed it, so it gave another error. This I corrected by manually moving the folder.

But don't be scared, this only happened to me. TO Son_Link for example it was installed without problems, or so he told me 😉

Enable SDDM on Arch Linux

Once the installation was finished I proceeded to activate SDDM and replace KDM. Those of us who use Arch Linux know that to start a daemon or service we use the command:

$ sudo systemctl enable demonio.service

If we want to start it at that moment only:

$ sudo systemctl start demonio.service

Well, the normal thing would have been to disable KDM in the following way:

$ sudo systemctl disable kdm.service

And then activate SDDM:

$ sudo systemctl enable sddm.service

But it is that SDDM did not give me this option, so I had to do the work manually. For this we go and edit the file: /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service.

This file by default had this:

[Unit] Description = K Display Manager After = systemd-user-sessions.service [Service] ExecStart = / usr / bin / kdm -nodaemon [Install] Alias ​​= display-manager.service

So I deleted it and left it like this:

[Unit] Description = Simple Desktop Display Manager After = systemd-user-sessions.service [Service] ExecStart = / usr / bin / sddm Restart = always [Install] Alias ​​= display-manager.service

I saved, rebooted the computer and voila. It started automatically SDDM instead of KDM.

Configuration

To configure SDDM in KDE we just have to go to System Preferences » Login Screen (SDDM) and we will get something like this:

As you can see we can change the theme of SDDM and luckily for us we have 4 nice options to choose from. At the bottom right there is a button that allows us to change the background image.

In the Advanced tab we find other interesting options such as the default cursor theme or the possibility of logging in automatically.

And that is all dear friends. We already have another option to use as Session Manager. Remember that there are other alternatives such as GDM, LightDM, KDM, XDM, SLiM or just not use any 😛

Available themes

Here are some screenshots of the rest of the themes that we can select: