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Dear all,
Over the last few weeks I've been enjoying setting up a Gentoo system on
my PC. The main reason for this is to gain a better understanding of the
different components that make up a Linux system, starting with a very
minimal base. Also, I'm rather partial to the 'suckless.org' philosophy:
small, non-interactive programs that can be combined together with shell
scripts to suit the user's individual needs. Since many suckless
programs have optional features distributed as patches to be applied at
compile-time, Gentoo seems the perfect distribution to explore this.
It has all been smooth-running until now: I am rather puzzled as to the
'login daemon' that seems to be required by Xorg. There are three
options for this component:
- systemd-logind, which I'd rather not use as it requires the entirety
of systemd, something that I am avoiding for this machine.
- consolekit, which has recently been removed from Gentoo's ebuild
repository following its abandonment upstream.
- elogind, which is systemd-logind but modified to run independently of
the rest of systemd, built to satisfy Gnome's reliance on it when
running other init systems.
There aren't many to choose from! All of the above require dbus - I've
read that some on this list maintain systems without dbus, which makes
me wonder whether such 'login daemons' are indeed even necessary!
As I understand it, the display manager runs as root when you start the
computer and provides a login prompt. When you enter the correct user
information it sets some SUID bits, starts the X server and executes
.xinitrc for a given TTY: Xorg, thus, still runs as root.
With logind, something happens over dbus to allow the X server to run as
an unprivileged user instead of the SUID method, and provides the
'loginctl' command to manage logins.
If I'm missing anything I would love to know. I would very much
appreciate if someone here could explain what is needed to run Xorg for
a non-root user, and what the alternative to loginctl would be with such
a 'logindless' setup - if of course one exists as I'm hoping!
Many thanks and best wishes,
Sebastian
Freenode: 'seabass'
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