#linux,
#gentoo,
#display-manager,
#ly,
#tty
Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD.
Premise
A few months ago, my Gentoo install came to be in a rather annoying predicament. After booting from GRUB, I was greeted by a black screen instead of the usual TTY. I inserted my credentials nonetheless, and to my relief, I could successfully launch X.
I was confident that the culprit was a kernel option for the video driver. Yet I did not have quite enough time or motivation to investigate, so I eventually ended up getting used to logging in from a blank tty.
In the meantime, I began looking into display managers, hoping that they would prevent similar situations. While searching, I stumbled upon ly and was intrigued.
Yesterday I had some free time and decided finally to try ly out.
Installing Ly
Ly doesn’t have an ebuild in the official Gentoo repository yet, but there is one in the GURU overlay1.
The project README also has a section about installing on Gentoo2.
However, I decided to install it directly from git and compile it myself. I had already all the dependencies installed, except for Zig.
emerge --ask dev-lang/zig-bin
After cloning the repository, I installed ly following the instructions.
zig build installopenrc
rc-update del display-manager
rc-update add ly
Fixing the blank TTY
After rebooting, my screen was once again a blank slate. 😦
I did some digging and found a very helpful discussion on the Gentoo forum3.
Apparently newer nvidia drivers conflict with some kernel options (FB_SIMPLE, SYSFB_SIMPLEFB, DRM_SIMPLEDRM).
I disabled them and recompiled my kernel (see here for details).
Now my TTYs can be seen once again, hooray!
Moving to Openrc-init
Unfortunately, ly does not support sysvinit, Gentoo’s default init system.
Since my system is based around OpenRC, I decided to enable OpenRC’s own init.
For an easier transition I added the sysv-utils use flags to sys-apps/openrc and reemerged.
echo "sys-apps/openrc sysv-utils" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge --ask --oneshot --newuse sys-apps/openrc
To start using openrc-init you just need to pass the parameter init=/sbin/openrc-init to the kernel.
Also, remember to disable agetty in the tty used by ly (the default is tty2).
rc-update del agetty.tty2
Fixing the xinitrc
At this point, ly is being displayed in the second tty.
The input also worked and I could log into a shell session.
But the same can’t be said for the xinitrc environment.
Despite having made the .xinitrc an executable shell script, I was
instantly logged out every time I tried it.
After some debugging, I discovered that the root of the problem was my home layout.
To adopt the XDG specification, I had moved the xinitrc and most of my configuration files to the .config
directory.
The environmental variables (PATH, XINITRC, etc.) were being assigned in my .zshrc file,
which is sourced only by interactive shells.
This is the reason running startx from a shell worked, while the same scripts failed
when run by ly.
I moved the environment initialization to the .zprofile file, which is always sourced.
After this last change, I could finally start an X session from ly. 🥳
Configuring Ly
These are my initial modifications to the /etc/ly/config.ini file.
36c36
< animation = none
---
> animation = doom
88c88
< clock = null
---
> clock = %c
114c114
< hide_key_hints = false
---
> hide_key_hints = true
118c118
< initial_info_text = null
---
> initial_info_text = core login
174c174
< session_log = ly-session.log
---
> session_log = .cache/ly-session.log
192c192
< text_in_center = false
---
> text_in_center = true
216c216
< xinitrc = ~/.xinitrc
---
> xinitrc = ~/.config/X11/xinitrc