entrance - An EFL based display manager

This is a fork and current development version. It is ALIVE! IT WORKS! (for me™).

This version of entrance has worked in some form or another since 2017. The entire EFL community has repeatedly shunned entrance for years. Many incorrectly assume this version is the same as past versions, when many have never run or seen this version.

There has been talk of making Enlightenment a login manager as many under Wayland have no choice to do, such as Gnome and GDM, soon KDE and SDDM. There has never been any efforts, and you are reduced to starting Enlightenment with some other DM like Light-DM, SDDM, etc, or startx. However, this is reliant on one person as so much of EFL and Enlightenment has been for decades, and the developer community has never grown.

Maybe someday Enlightenment can log into itself, but in the years since 2017 to 2026, and in foreseeable future in 2026, the way to log into Enlightenment Desktop is?

Sadly, while EFL has much potential, its toxic community has shunned developers for years. All efforts with entrance have been frowned upon and discouraged since 2017, and development has continued, despite it all! It took almost 10 years to get another's improved efforts into Enlightenment, and re-written upon addition.

If entrance development will continue remains to be seen, there is new interest in entrance development, but like all other EFL app efforts, the future is unknown. Hopefully, this version of entrance will not face abandonment as past versions, and most EFL applications.

The best tech does not always win, it can rise or fall based on communities!

About

Entrance is a Unix Display/Login Manager written in Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). Entrance allows a user to choose a X WM/Desktop session to launch upon successful login. Entrance is alive and working again for logging into X sessions and eventually Wayland sessions!

The project has been resurrected from the dead to live on once again...

History

Entrance is a long story. There have been 2 different code bases and projects both using the name entrance.

3rd Generation

This project is the 3rd generation, fork of the 2nd Generation code base, with a lot of fixes, and initial removal of incomplete and/or broken code. Rather than fix as is, we are looking to replace functionality with new code and finding different ways of accomplishing similar functionality.

This generation is currently in development, and should be usable. Please open an issue for any problems encountered.

2nd Generation

Sometime later another came along, Michael Bouchaud/@eyoz who renamed his project elsa to Entrance, which is where the current code base came from. It is not known if this was ever completed or worked, it did not function correctly, if it is even usable to log in at all.

The broken, incomplete, unmaintained 2nd Generation Entrance resides in Enlightenment's entrance git repository. A branch may be added to this repository for historical purposes.

1st Generation

There was a project long ago that worked, and went MIA. Copies of the sources for some releases are in some distro repositories. A copy has been obtained via a PCLinuxOS src rpm. Ideally, it would be great to get a copy of the old entrance repo to add to this one for historical purposes. If you have a copy of the old Entrance repository, please open an issue and provide a link. That would be greatly appreciated!

Build

Entrance presently uses meson build system.

Build using meson

prefix=/usr/share
meson \
    --prefix "${prefix}" \
    --bindir "${prefix}/bin" \
    --sbindir "${prefix}/sbin" \
    --datadir "${prefix}/share" \
    --sysconfdir "/etc" \
    -Dpam=true \
    -Dlogind=true \
    . build
ninja -C build

On most systems you likely need a pam file. Meson will install this file.

cp data/entrance.pam.d /etc/pam.d/entrance

The systemd service file is presently not installed. It may or may not be usable and/or correct. Please see the section on logind/elogind for further information.

Configuration

Most things can be configured in entrance.conf at /etc/entrance/entrance.conf. Some settings may not work. Please file issues for anything that is not configurable or does not work.

Usage

In order to start entrance, you need a system init script or systemd (untested). This may differ based on your operating system. Entrance does not provide an init script at this time, it may not run or work correctly if started directly. Entrance should be invoked via init script or systemd service. There is a provided systemd service file for entrance. It is unknown if this works or not.

Entrance User

Entrance presently starts as root, and then, uses setuid to run entrance_client under the user nobody. This was done via sudo and su for a bit before switching to setuid. Entrance also used to run under the "entrance" user but was changed in this past commit. Inherited design from the 2nd generation.

It may be changed such that entrance runs under its own user, and does not setuid or run under root. This will require creation of a user account and adding permissions for the user for video, etc. It may be possible to accomplish this now, starting entrance under a user say "entrance" by modifying the untested entrance.conf start_user option:

value "start_user" string: "entrance";

You will likely also need to create a directory for entrance, and ensure it has proper permissions. Since entrance will not be running under root, entrance will not be able to correct this, despite having code for such. Expect to see some errors in log file otherwise, along with non-functional entrance. If started as root, entrance will create directories with proper permissions as needed.

Multiple Displays

Entrance supports multiple displays, with the login form residing on the primary display. In some cases this does not work correctly. If using X, you may need to set the following settings in your monitor sections.

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "A"
    Option      "position"  "0 0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "B"
    Option      "LeftOf"    "A"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "C"
    Option      "RightOf"   "A"
EndSection

Without such, only the background will appear. The login form will not appear along with the rest of the UI, and the cursor will be an X. This likely due to bugs in entrance code. The work around is the previously mentioned monitors section.

logind/elogind aka systemd

Initial logind/elogind code has been added to entrance thanks to @OxusByte45, and this works in some environments, but we are still working out issues in CI before fully confirming that entrance supports logind/elogind. That is the current area of development focus, for more information please refer to Logind/elogind Integration Implementation.

This work should be completed soon, and there will be the first actual release of entrance shortly thereafter.

wayland display sessions

Once again thanks to @OxusByte45, entrance now has initial support for launching Wayland sessions! This is not as heavily tested, and is not being presently tested in CI. Please report any issues with launching Wayland sessions, preferable, Enlightenment under Wayland, when the mesa issues are resolved.

It is not known how well this will work to launch other Desktop environments, but testing is welcomed!

To-do

This isn't really an accurate todo list, but merging in legacy external TODO file contents, this maybe revised for more accuracy as project direction becomes more well defined.

• logind integration (IN PROGRESS - core implementation done, needs testing, CI passing)
  • Session tracking via sd_login APIs
  • Seat detection and management
  • VT number auto-detection
  • Session type (X11/Wayland) support
  • Multi-seat awareness
• virtual keyboard support
• [-] Wayland support, client for DM and session
  • Basic detection and XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland set
  • Full wayland compositor support needed
• theme for cursor
• clean up codebase