Entrance doesn't work - Doesn't allow system to boot

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1

I decided to migrate from kdm to entrance as

So I installed entrance and then in /etc/sysconfig Editor > Desktop > Display Manager changed from kdm to entrance.
After reboot the entrance dm didn’t show up. Neither did any other DM. In plymouth screen it showed **Reached Target Graphical … **(don’t remember it correctly)

So in tty1 session I ran yast trying to undo the /etc/sysconfig Editor > Desktop > Display Manager changes by setting it back to kdm.

Restarted and bingo I could boot.

So, following questions

  1. Did I follow correct procedure to migrate from kdm to entrance.
  2. Is their any command line equivalent to /etc/sysconfig Editor > Desktop > Display Manager
  3. I want suggestions for dm which take less time to load. I don’t features like saving session. I should have options for different de and obliviously should look good.
  4. Is their problem with entrance - Portal:Enlightenment page of openSUSE wiki says it does have a problem.
2

I have no experience with entrance nor enlightenment and have no idea whether it should work or not, but I’ll try to answer some of your questions.

If you installed the package from the openSUSE repo, then yes.

Is their any command line equivalent to /etc/sysconfig Editor > Desktop > Display Manager

Yes, just edit the file /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager with a text editor of your choice. Command line text editors are e.g. vim, emacs, joe, nano, pico, mcedit, …

And there’s the command line YaST interface too, of course… :wink:

I want suggestions for dm which take less time to load. I don’t features like saving session. I should have options for different de and obliviously should look good.

Well, I’d say xdm should be rather quick to load, and is installed by default. But it definitely doesn’t match your other criteria… :wink:
Probably your best choice would be lightdm. Other lightweight DMs include lxdm, wdm, and slim, but I don’t really know them.
sddm might be an option too, but you probably shouldn’t use the Plasma5 breeze theme (i.e. don’t install sddm-branding-openSUSE) as this pulls in the whole Plasma5 desktop and also might have problems with a long startup time at the moment.

Is their problem with entrance - Portal:Enlightenment page of openSUSE wiki says it does have a problem.

As indicated already, I cannot answer that.
I might give it a try though.
I don’t see any specific problem with entrance mentioned on that page though…

3

I haven’t tried entrance yet (still installing the necessary packages), but I have an idea what might be your problem:
enlightenment is included in the distribution, but entrance is only available from additional repos.
If you installed the enlightenment packages from the standard repos, and entrance from somewhere else, they might be incompatible, causing entrance to crash.

So try to do a vendor switch to the repo you installed entrance from (“Switch all system packages…” in YaST, or “zypper dup -from XXX”).

4

Hi,

You can edit the /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager on the run, using ed. Something like this.

printf '%s
' '/^DEFAULT_WM=.*$/s/=.*$/="entrance"/' w | ed -s /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager

Replace entrance by any value you like. That should work on any posix compliant shell.

If you want to script it then this might be of help.

#!/usr/bin/env bash


file=/etc/sysconfig/windowmanager
display=entrance


ed -s "$file" <<EOF
/^DEFAULT_WM=.*$/s/=.*$/="$display"
w
EOF

That also works with dash and POSIX sh. Just replace the values (after the equal signs) of the variables. Other than that i can’t really help you :slight_smile:

5

No.
entrance is a display manager (i.e. login screen), not a window manager.
Setting it as window manager will make Xorg fall back to twm I think… :wink:

So replace /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager with /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager, and “DEFAULT_WM” with “DISPLAYMANAGER”, and your scripts should be correct.
But this still would not change the problem that entrance fails to start/doesn’t work…

6

Hi,

Right, thanks for correcting me. This might work.

#!/usr/bin/env bash


file=displaymanager
value=entrance
manager=DISPLAYMANAGER


ed -s "$file" <<EOF
/^$manager=.*$/s/=.*$/="$value"
w
EOF

There should be enough variables in there to adjust to ones need.
But yeah, that is not the complete solution to the OP’s question :frowning:

7

Right.
JFYI, I can confirm a problem here now.

When setting entrance as display manager, I only get a black screen instead of a login screen.
Doing a full switch to the repo didn’t help either.

So there does seem to be a general problem with entrance indeed (at least the one from the X11:Enlightenment:Factory repo, haven’t tried Nightly).
I noticed that the installed entrance PAM file is broken (I saw error messages about that in “systemctl status display-manager”), but even after trying to fix it (not sure if I’ve done it correctly…) I still see the same problem.

Sorry, I don’t have the time or motivation to further investigate this at the moment though.

8

OK I’ll consult with simotek and file a bug report.

9

This doesn’t surprise me as entrance is effectively unmaintained. The package currently doesn’t even build, the last package was updated over a year ago by Sleep_Walker. There was alot of source code changes mid-late last year so it may be in a state where it would work if you updated the package with the latest source, but theres a fair chance that it won’t I don’t know if anyone has added systemd user session / logind support yet which we are using now and will really need into the future with wayland. Unfortunately for me at the moment the benefit / time factor for entrance has it right at the bottom of my todo list, there are alot of other things that I could spend my time on first which will give people alot more benefit then entrance.

Having said that i’m happy to give someone some help if they want to get it working themselves. The first step would be getting it building again, as there doesn’t seem to have been a recent release you will probably need to make a tarball from the git repo, this can be done by cloning the git repository https://git.enlightenment.org/misc/entrance.git/ which can be done by running

./autogen.sh

./configure
  • not sure if you will need to set any other flags here,
./configure --help

will give you a list

./make dist

That will create a tar with the source code required to build a package, once you have that you should fork the entrance package on obs https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/X11:Enlightenment:Factory/entrance upload your new tar get it building then test it. If it works for you then you can push the package back and I will accept it. Although I wouldn’t want to include it in the main distribution until after its had a official release and were sure it works well.

If entrance doesn’t currently support systemd user sessions launching enlightenment with it may cause some things such as file mounting not to work, as at the moment we use the systemd user session to run the polkit agent, there are other polkit agents that you should be able to run on startup to fix this though.

For now I have deleted the old packages on obs as they would have been from last time it built which was probably a different efl version, hopefully that will help better indicate to people in general that its unmaintained. I probably need to go through the X11:Enlightenment:Factory and clean up some of the old stuff and mark it as unmaintained. As a rule of thumb any package that is also in openSUSE:Factory will be well maintained, other packages may not be, especially if they don’t currently build.

10

The actual current error at the moment is

edje_cc: Error. parse error ../../../data/themes/old/default.edc:678. invalid state name: 'defaault'. "default" state must always be first

which means someone has made a typo in the theme, I imagine this is fixed in the git version

11

OK. The entrance 0.0.99 is ready for testing. But do it on your own risk as it’s my first package.
Goto https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Avish_99%3Abranches%3AX11%3AEnlightenment%3AFactory&package=entrance

I’ve long way to go. :smiley: