shlomi@home:~$

How to compile lightdm (linux)

lightdm is popular display manager used in linux distros. In my case, I want to use it to create my own greeter. A greeter is the ‘login page’ of the linux distro.

Let’s get to it.

On Ubuntu 22.04 (server/desktop, doesn’t matter):

apt install build-essential autoconf gtk-doc-tools intltool libgcrypt20-dev libpam0g-dev libgtk-3-dev automake pkg-config fakeroot debhelper liblightdm-gobject-1-dev yelp-tools git

Then clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/canonical/lightdm

Compile:

./autogen.sh

make

Install lightdm:

make install

Configuration can be found at: /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/

NOTE: When you reboot, the greeter should not have changed; lightdm is only display manager, it doesn’t provide greeter itself. When installing lightdm from apt directly, it installs lightdm, and lightdm-gtk-greeter.