Core: Display Manager

Display Manager (Ly)

About

It's a minimalistic display manager that's simple to setup and use.

Packages

• required:

  • ly

• alternative:

  • ly-reloaded

• optional:

  • terminus-font

Installation

main setup:

Just download the ly package from the AUR, first. I recommend you using an AUR helper like yay, to help install and manage it's updates.

yay -S ly

Then enable the service

sudo systemctl enable ly.service

If you need to switch between ttys after Ly's start you also have to disable getty on Ly's tty to prevent "login" from spawning on top of it

sudo systemctl disable [email protected]

source: Ly ReadMe

change back-, foreground color & font:

Ly is basically an application that runs on your tty (in this case tty2) after startup. This will have the disadvantage of ly having to inherit the back-,foreground and font of the tty it's running on.
Luckily, you can fix this with a "hack": We will simply need to change the font and colors of the tty before ly is ran by systemd. To do this we will need to edit the service file of ly with this example file.

sudo mv  ~/dotfiles/blob/master/root/lib/systemd/system/ly.service /lib/systemd/system/ly.service

You can also edit the ly.service file manually. Just add the command that you want to execute before that ly start up after ExecStartPre=, under [Service].
Also don't forget to use the full path name of the command that you wish to execute.

run xinitrc as desktop session:

<++>

Troubleshoot

The font is too small:

The font is based on the font used by your tty. Meaning you should should install a tty font with a bigger size like terminus-font. You could try the font first out, in a tty (to enter one just Ctrl+Alt+F1-6 or Ctrl+Alt+Fn+F1-6) with the following commands:
First check the available tty fonts on your system:

ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts | grep \.gz |sed 's/\..*//'

To try the font out

setfont <font-name>

I recommend installing terminus-font from the Arch Repo. Only if you're looking for a bigger font, of course.

Once you have found your desired font. I recommend modifying the ly.service instead of editing the /etc/vconsole.conf file like shown in the Arch Wiki. The reason being, that it isn't as consistent. It sometimes set the right font and it sometimes don't.
That's why suggest running the setfont command before ly is executed. Like in my ly.service file:

...
[Service]
...
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/setfont ter-122b
...