I just upgraded to Leap 42.1 about a week ago and I can’t figure out how to display an avatar in the SDDM initial login screen. Following installation of Leap 42.1, the avatar has been a blank white rectangle and I cannot figure out how to change it to a photo or some other image. I have tried putting a png image named username.face.icon into the SDDM default avatar directory at /usr/share/sddm/faces/, however I cannot get anything to be displayed. All I get is that same old blank white rectangle no matter the image that I use or the file permissions, etc.
Actually in this case it doesn’t matter really.
The user avatar is a desktop independent thing…
It is saved as ~/.face or ~/.face.icon normally.
The original problem sounds like related to permissions though.
SDDM’s greeter runs as unprivileged user “sddm”, make sure that it can read your file, i.e. the file has read permissions for “others”.
Using KDE’s settings to change the avatar should make sure that the permissions are ok.
I did a complete new install when I migrated to Leap 42.1 from 13.2 and I do not have any KDE4 stuff. My installation is exclusively Plasma 5.
I already had setup the avatar at: configure desktop (systemsettigns5) > Account Details > User.
The avatar shows up when I logout from an existing session, however, it does not show up for the first login after rebooting the computer. The two screens are somewhat different between the initial boot login screen and the login screen that is displayed after logging out. The initial boot login screen does not show the avatar and only shows a blank white rectangle whereas, when I logout, the avatar is properly displayed. So, I am trying to figure out how to make the avatar be displayed on the initial login screen after restarting the computer.
It should be displayed on the initial login screen as well, without doing anything special.
The question is what you mean with “The two screens are somewhat different between the initial boot login screen and the login screen that is displayed after logging out”, they should be exactly the same.
What exactly is the difference? Or is it just that the avatar is not displayed in the one case and is in the other?
Just to be sure, post the output of:
ls -l ~/.face*
And did you somehow activate sddm.service manually? Or are you using the default display-manager.service?
There were problems with sddm.service AFAIR.
As workaround, you could switch to a different displaymanager, set it in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager, or try with a different SDDM theme (Configure Desktop->Startup and Shutdown->Login Screen (SDDM)). Does it work then?
Thanks for your reply! With some hints from your posts, I figured the problem out and fixed it. The file, “~/.face” was set to “-rwxr-----” and so I changed the permissions to “-rwxr–r–” and the avatar then showed up on the login screens.
I was mistaken in my earlier comments about the avatar appearing after logging out but not on the initial boot’s login page. That is, you were right, they are both the same screen. However, I was thinking about the login screen that appears when the screen is locked which is different and where the photo has always appeared. It then occurred to me that it must be a permissions problem if the avatar will appear when I am logged in and lock the screen but not appear when I am not logged in.
In any event, the problem is fixed. Thanks for your replies and assistance!
Well, that’s the lock screen, that’s unrelated to SDDM (or whatever displaymanager you use) and does run as the logged-in user so it was able to access the file.
In any event, the problem is fixed. Thanks for your replies and assistance!
