 One of the most important pieces of software on any Linux distribution is the login manager, or they sometimes call it a display manager. What is a login manager? It's the screen that you see when you first boot up your computer and it asks you for name and password to get into your desktop environment. It's really important, especially if you have multiple desktop environments or multiple window managers installed on your machine, because the login manager, other than you entering a name and a password, it also allows you to switch between all the various desktop environments and window managers you happen to have installed. And that's important for me because I have like 15 window managers installed on my main production machine. So a login manager makes sense for me because it allows me to easily switch between the various window managers, you know, whatever I feel like logging into that day. One of the most common login managers is a program called SDDM, which is the simple desktop display manager, I believe is what it stands for. It's the default login manager for KDE Plasma and LXQ, but SDDM can be used as a login manager for any desktop environment or window manager. And it's one of the most common ones today. Let me switch over to my desktop and let me pull up a virtual machine here of Manjaro because this is Manjaro KDE because it's KDE Plasma here. The default login manager here is SDDM. Now, one of the very cool things about SDDM is just how themable it is because literally you can change anything you want to about a login manager like SDDM because you can configure it. If you have the proper skills, you can actually move around the date and time and your avatars, you know, the little pictures. If you take one with a webcam of your user, you can move around the text boxes for username and password and things like that. You can move the shutdown buttons and you can actually re-themed the shutdown buttons and just everything about SDDM is configurable. And I thought it would be really cool to configure my own SDDM theme for my DTOS script, which is a script for a post installation script for Arch Linux. And it installs my Xmoned desktop environment and the fish shell and Doomy Max and all of that. And I thought it would be really cool to have a theme for the SDDM login manager that gets installed with DTOS. So I have never actually been a SDDM user because for years I always used LightDM as my login manager. And the other thing is SDDM is a cute application. I've never actually played around with cute theming or anything like that. So this was going to be a real challenge for me. So the first thing I did was I went to the AUR and I looked up SDDM because I wanted to see how many SDDM themes were in the AUR. And apparently theming SDDM is very easy because there's like 30, 40, maybe 50 SDDM themes to choose from. So I noticed that there was one here called Solarized SDDM-Theme. And if I go to their GitHub page, you can see what this is. I think they have a screenshot. It's a very simple theme. It uses Solarized Dark for the colors. And when I saw that, I thought, man, that is really cool because the other day, you know, I made, I've made a couple of videos actually in the last couple of weeks about color schemes, specifically about the DOOM 1 color scheme and Solarized and Groovebox and all of that. I have nine different color schemes that I use in DTOS. And I have all nine color schemes available in DOOM Emacs, in the Alacrity Terminal, in my X-Mobar panel, in Kanki. And I thought it would be really cool if I could have all nine of those color schemes available in my SDDM theme. So I actually spent several hours each day for the last three days working on my own SDDM theme. So what I did is because I didn't really know how to theme this properly as far as the config, I actually took the config from this particular repository, Solarized SDDM theme. And of course, I edited quite a bit for my colors specific to my color schemes that I wanted to use. And he had some artwork here. I didn't use any of the artwork because I figured I would create my own artwork because I was going to have to create a ton of different images because I wasn't going to just have one background image. I was going to have at least nine background images plus you're going to need some of the images for your shutdown logo and your reboot logo, the little icons you see on your login manager that reboot the system if you click on it. So let me switch back over to my desktop and I'll show you exactly what I did. I'm going to open a terminal for this because I want to be able to zoom in. So you guys can actually see all this and I created a new GitLab repository for I called my color scheme multicolor dash SDDM dash theme and if I do an LS you can see I created some directories here PNG SVG and XCF depending on what type of images I was creating XCF if I CD into that that is the default image format for gimp. So if I LS you see I have nine different XCF files each one based on one of the nine color schemes that I want to use and I include the gimp XCF files for those that want to edit these files it makes it a lot easier to have these images as XCF because I've got various layers that are still in the images that you can play around with again it just makes editing the images easier. Now of course I need to export all of these to ping to a to a proper ping format so there are the nine pings and if you guys want to see these in full size let me just open this inside SXIV here and we'll make this full screen I'll get rid of the bottom border there and that is the doom one color scheme and that's going to be the background image on my login manager. Yeah I'll have this color scheme here this in this background image and then we'll have the date and time somewhere over here and then we'll have the username and password text box over here and if you need to change amongst different desktop environments or window managers there'll be a drop down menu in the top left hand corner so that's the doom one image I created and all I did was again I since I saved these as XCF files it's very easy to change the colors inside gimp so once I had the doom one color scheme of background image here created it was very easy for me then to go ahead and create a image for Dracula so let me go ahead and hit in on the keyboard here inside SXIV in for next that is the Dracula background image and that's the growth box dark background image and that I believe is the monikai probe background image that is definitely Nord and that's oceanic next this of course solarized dark and oh my goodness that's bright solarized light and of course tomorrow night so all nine of the color schemes you know that I've already had available and so many of my other programs inside DTOS now we're going to make sure that our login manager screen has background images or each of the nine color schemes so let me CD up a directory and this is the main directory for multicolor dash SDM dash theme clear the screen here and do an LS and of course I've created a read me and I've already made package builds for it for arch package builds and I've already made a package build and uploaded it to the AUR so you guys can already install multicolor dash SDM dash theme from the AUR if I go back to my browser I think I was logged into my AUR login here and I've got three packages currently listed in the AUR I don't have my own repository of arch software of course in the DTOS core repository so I don't package too much stuff in the AUR but I thought the multicolor SDM theme was a good package to throw in the AUR it will also be in the DTOS core repository as well so here is my GitLab page for the new multicolor SDM theme repository and then of course I need to make sure that all of this gets installed and enabled by default in DTOS but let me show you for those of you that don't want to install DTOS how multicolor SDDM theme works so if you were in a arch based Linux distribution for example since we already have this VM up of Manjaro KDE let me go ahead and log in and if you just want to install this from the AUR let me zoom in all you need to do inside a Manjaro they use Paru as their AUR helper so I'll do a Paru dash capital S multicolor SDDM dash theme actually kind of interested if this installs correctly because I just finished working on this within the last 30 minutes or so like it's gonna be my first test really with this so let me enter my root password and it just installed multicolor SDDM theme now that doesn't mean the theme is active and enabled it's still going to use the standard Manjaro SDDM theme because there's config files that you need to edit so typically that config file that you need to edit for SDDM it'll be located in one of two places it'll either be located in user lib sddm sddm.conf.d it'll be listed in that particular directory I know that's a long directory they'll be like a default .conf in that directory on many distributions here inside Manjaro it is actually slash etsy slash sddm .conf and that's actually kind of nice you get to type a shorter pass I'm going to do sudo vim slash etsy slash sddm .conf and what you need to do is find the the theme section and there will be current equals and then name of theme and by default in Manjaro they're using breath 2 what I'm going to do I may actually want the breath 2 theme back in future videos but right now I'm going to create a new line here and I'm going to do current equals multi color dash sddm dash theme and then write and quit and now if I log out of kde plasma here so I'm going to click on leave log out log out it'll kick us back out to the sddm log in manager except now it should be using my multi color sddm theme and by default it's going to use the doom one colors and there you go now it doesn't look quite right because the screen resolution is off I've got a 1920 by 1080 monitor but the the resolution is much smaller yeah I was even zoomed in a little bit there it's more like a 1024 by 768 or something so a very small resolution makes it kind of scrunched up but you can see how it kind of would look on a proper size monitor you have your username and password boxes here get your time and date which is usually centered above these boxes but everything's kind of scrunched up unfortunately in this VM and then you have a drop-down box where all your sessions will be listed if you have multiple window managers or desktop environments selected now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to log back in and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to uninstall this because I want to see if this gets installed correctly if I run the the script for DTOS so I'm going to do a sudo pacman dash capital R for remove multi color sddm dash theme let's go ahead and remove that and since we remove that we need to make sure that I go back into the slash etsy slash sddm dot com remember I didn't delete the line that had the breath two theme so let me go ahead and uncomment that and I'll just delete the line that was setting multi color sddm theme and now everything is back to the way it is on a fresh install of manjaro kde plasma so now let's go ahead and run through a DTOS installation let me go back to a different workspace here because I want to show you what I added to the DTOS script here enable sddm for login manager it installs sddm it enables sddm well first it disables whatever display manager you have said if you have one then it enables sddm as your login manager and then if there is a file on your system at userlibsddmsddm.com.ddefault.com that's a long path but if that file exists I'm going to copy it and make a backup of it and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and with said replace current equals whatever current theme is currently set to and I'm going to do current equals multi color dash sddm dash theme now that of course is only going to work on uh systems that use userlibsddmsddm.com.d slash default dot config what well manjaro kde we already know uses slash etsy slash sddm.com so I may have to actually add uh add some more information here I may actually what I need to do probably just to cover all of my bases I'm actually going to copy all of that and I'm going to paste the exact same thing except this time let's go ahead just in case because distributions will have that config file in various places just in case they have a etsy sddm.com let's make sure that we change that all right so I added this new section so if either one of these files exists we're changing the current theme in those files so let me write that let me export that to the dtos shell script and then of course I need to push this to my get lab so I'm going to cd into get lab dash repose dtos and just quickly I'm going to do a get add dash you get commit uh editing slash etsy slash sddm.com is going to be the commit message get push and now let's actually go ahead and see if we can run this dtos script and then everything works correctly so I'm going to do a get clone https colon slash slash get lab.com slash dwt1 slash dtos now let's cd into the dtos directory if I did it in ls you will see a script there called dtos so do dot slash dtos to run the script all right you get some welcome information just hit okay four times it's adding the pgp keys it added the dtos core repository to this installation of manjaro because many of the packages have to install from the dtos core repository because I package about 30 of my own programs now at this point and it's going to install 347 packages I'll pause the video I'll be back once the installation has gotten further along all right it looks like it's getting close to finishing the package install and then once it finishes installing those 347 packages with pac-man it has to run through an installation of doom emacs as well the doom emacs portion of the installation actually is the longest part of the install it's going to take five maybe 10 minutes answer yes to both questions that doom emacs will ask you so stay close to your keyboard during the installation because you will have to answer yes a couple of times and the installation of doom emacs is almost complete there's that second yes or no question do you want to download and install all the icon fonts yes we do all right now we're very close to the end of the dtos script it needs a root pass word for something so give it your root pass word so it can recompile xmonad and then it allows us to choose our default shell our default user shell I want to be using the fish shell so I'll choose one and then it says enable sddm as a login manager so we got that message so hopefully that worked and then it says dtos has been installed do you want to reboot your computer sure now if we had a another login manager previously enabled it was disabled with the dtos script sdm was enabled and then we edited the sdm config file assuming it was in one of those two places in our script that we were searching for files and then changing the current theme from whatever it happens to be set to to multicolor sdm theme and by default it's going to use the doom one colors so that is the background image let me show you how to change from the doom one background image to one of the other eight color schemes so let me hit ctrl-alt-t here inside manjaro to open a terminal and let me zoom in here and what i'm going to do is i actually logged into plasma instead of the xmonad desktop I should have let me go back I really didn't want to do this in plasma all right now that we're back to the login manager let me go to the drop down here and actually select xmonad and now let's log in just to make sure that the dtos script actually worked yeah we have my xmonad desktop let me do a xrander-s 1920 by 1080 to get a proper screen resolution uh and all of that looks good it's we still got some weirdness going on with the background i'm going to set a random background image just to fix the wallpaper and i'll go ahead and kill all khaki as well since the khaki's out of place since we changed the screen resolution there so dtos does look like it's working correctly let me launch a new terminal here and this is the alacrity terminal and sddm themes anytime you install an sddm theme it needs to go in slash a user slash share slash uh sddm slash themes if i did a ls in that directory that is where all of your sddm themes need to go and you see multicolor sddm theme but we have five other themes we could choose from including breath two which was the default theme that manjaro was using so if i cd into user share sddm themes multicolor sddm theme you will see there is a config file there that theme dot comf and then do sudo vim or nano or whatever text editor you're comfortable using theme dot comf and it's going to ask for a root password and this is the default theme dot comf you see background equals ping slash doom dash one dash o one dot ping well there are eight other pings including dracula and we really want to go crazy gruff box dark not my favorite theme but i'm going to change it for now let's write and quit that so writing and that file there that one theme dot com file in the multicolor sddm theme folder should actually do what we wanted it to do yeah it kicks us right back out to the login manager when i quit and there is the gruff box dark wallpaper and let me log back in i'm going to terminal let me run that x ranger command one more time i'm going to up arrow a few times because i want to cd back into the multicolor sddm theme directory and sudo vim theme dot com one more time just to verify that everything else is working let's do a solarized dark right and quit that quit out of x monad and there is the solarized dark so again nine different options available with multicolor sddm theme so there are three different ways you guys can install multicolor sddm theme depending on what distribution you happen to be running so let me go ahead and go back to the gitlab repository for my theme and i think i have a section here for installation so in arch linux those of you that are using the a u r just install multicolor sddm theme from the a u r for those of you that have the dtos core repository enabled or you're actually using dtos you guys will find multicolor sddm theme in the default repository so you can just install it using pacman now those of you that are not using an arch based system or dtos you guys what you're going to have to do is just clone this repository all you need to do is get clone this repository and then remember where the themes go they go in slash user slash share slash sdm slash themes that's all you need to do put this repository the folder that it creates put that in user share sddm themes then find the sddm.comp file wherever that default comp file is you know whatever it happens to be on your linux distribution and edit current equals make sure it says current equals multicolor dash sddm dash theme and that should work on any distribution that should work on a boon-two mint and fedora open susa whatever but i haven't tested it out on anything that's not an arch based system because i i don't run uh any non-arch based systems but i would assume that that should work on every linux distribution now before i go i need to think a few special people i need to think the producers of this episode gave james matt mitchell paul scott west of commie allen chuck commander angry curt dyokai david dylan gregory hyco lee maxim michael mike nitrix urion alexander peace arch and fedora polytech raver red prophet steven and willie these guys are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon they're the producers of this episode and i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen i'm going to show you a bunch of names here on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because without each and every one of these guys i couldn't make these videos i couldn't spend time creating cool things like multicolor sdm theme if you like my work and want to help support me please consider subscribing to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace