Login Screen

gemwm-greeter is GemWM’s login screen, for greetd. GEM never had one (TOS started straight into the desktop), so it’s the desktop before anyone’s on it: the menu bar with only Desk (Restart, Shut Down), the clock and battery, and the people who can log in as icons on the desktop, as the ST showed its disk drives.

Click one, or type a name, and a GEM dialog asks for the password and which session to start (from /usr/share/wayland-sessions). A wrong password is a GEM alert; anything more PAM asks (a code from a key, say) is asked in the same dialog. It remembers who logged in last, and with what.

Setting it up

greetd does the logging in; the greeter runs inside GemWM’s greeter mode, gemwm -G, which runs no key bindings and quits when the greeter does. In /etc/greetd/config.toml:

[default_session]
command = "/usr/local/bin/gemwm -G /usr/local/bin/gemwm-greeter"
user = "greeter"

Then make the directory it remembers in (or reboot), and restart greetd. Do this from a text console, or it ends your session:

sudo systemd-tmpfiles --create
sudo systemctl restart greetd

Its desktop

The desktop it shows is set in /etc/gemwm/greeter.conf, a [desktop] section as in your own config. A picture has to be somewhere the greeter user can read, not your home:

[desktop]
image = /usr/local/share/backgrounds/atari-wall.jpg
dither = st16