 I ran a poll a little while ago asking people what their preferred display manager was, and for the most part the results of that poll were pretty predictable. Most people seem to use the display manager that comes with their desktop environment. So if they use Plasma, they're probably using SDDM. If they're using GNOME, they're using GDM. If they're using pretty much anything else, they're probably using LightDM. But there were some surprising additions to that poll, and one of them was a display manager called LIY. Now this thing is something that I had never heard of before, and I was very interested in it because it's just like I said, it's something I never heard of before, and when I googled it and found out what it was, I was like, oh, this thing is for nerds. And anyone who knows me, like, I'm a nerd, so I wanted to try this thing out, and that's what we're going to do today. Now, for those of you who don't know what a display manager is, I don't really blame you. You log into their computer and carry on with whatever it is they have to do. And that explains exactly what a display manager is. It's the place where you log into your computer. So if you use a graphical display manager and you're not using something like StartX or something, chances are when you boot up to your computer, you're presented with something. You usually, it's some kind of wallpaper or a pure color. Maybe there's a bar along the top. Maybe there's not. But for sure, in the middle of the screen, probably in the middle of the screen, there is a box that allows you to type in your username and your password. That is the display manager. Now, it's called many different things. I call it a display manager because that's really what it is. But some people call it a login manager. Some people just call it the login screen, whatever you call it, pretty much everyone uses one of some kind. Now, what Lai is and why Lai is special is because it doesn't look how any other display manager actually looks or functions. So we're going to take a look at that today. Let's go ahead and jump in. So the first thing we're going to need to do is install this thing. So we're going to, I'm going to open up a browser here first. We're going to go ahead and type in Lai display manager into our search bar here. And it'll take us to the GitHub page. And this is what Lai actually looks like. And as you can tell, it doesn't really look like any other login screen you've ever seen before. Now it has the basic layout, if you will, of what a display manager needs to do. It has the place where you can put in your username and your password and your session. And it has some prompts up here in case you want to log out or reboot. That's all there is. And the reason why this is cool is because it's in the terminal. It makes it look like a terminal. And it is actually something that is run through one of your TTY services. So in this case, it's run through TTY1 and it's an endcurses like display manager. So how do you install this thing? So let's go ahead and resize the window here and open up a terminal. The way to install this is pretty simple. So the first thing you need to do is copy the command right here. This is basically going to clone the repository that Lai lives in. So you can do this wherever you want. You can do it in your home directory. If you have a git folder, you can do it there. It doesn't matter. The only requirement here is that you have git installed. So once you do that, you can hit enter and it will clone the repository. It won't take very long. We'll clear that. And then we're going to cd into that repository, which is called lily. And then we're going to run the make command. Now if you don't have make installed, you can install that on any system. It's probably already installed. But if you're on something like vanilla arch or you've installed like a headless version of a boon to or something like that, you may end up having to install it. But for the most part, most people probably going to have make installed already. So run this command. It won't take very long. And then the next thing it's going to want you to do is to test it. So we're going to go ahead and run this command here. Copy that run to this hit enter. And then it's going to ask you for your password because we're running sudo. And it's going to take you to a TTY in this case, it's taking you to TTY too. And what you really need to do is get out of this and go into TTY one, which you can do by doing control all F1. And that's going to take you back to your session of whatever you're in, whether you're not in this case, I'm in plasma, whatever you were in to install this thing will take you back there. And you'll see that lies actually working. Now it won't accept any input here. If you try to log in from here, it's just going to give you an error. You can see that it's working. So just hit control C, it'll go back to your shell session. Then what you want to do is actually install why what you do with this command here, sudo make install. You got to make sure you're pasting it correctly like that. And then it will just say installing. And that's all I'll do. It's done. Now here's where it gets a little bit different. So depending on what display manager you currently have installed, you're going to be doing one of several things. So if you are in a situation where you don't have a display manager installed at all, you can follow the directions to get X and RC working down here. If you are in a position where you have a display manager installed, so in case in cases like me, I'm using SDDM right now, you'll need to first uninstall SDDM. So sudo pacman in this case, because I'm on arch slash R and S SDDM. And it's going to tell me I can't do that. So I'm going to go back up this do SDDM dash KCM as well, like that. And then I can install it. So that's gone. And the next thing we want to do is run this command here. Now this command is probably going to give us an error. So we're going to run it anyways, and we're actually going to see that it does in fact give us an error. So let's get my face out of the way so you can actually see this will turn this off. And you can see it says this file here already exists so it can't be replaced. So what we want to do is actually delete that file. So sudo remove slash Etsy system D system display, oops display manager dot service, remove that. And it may ask for your password if you're not already in a root session, or already have already entered it before within the last few minutes. And then what we can do is go and rerun that command right here. And it will enable the system D service. Now, you can get this working with non system D distros. So if you're running something like run it or open RC something like that, you can get lie to work. The instructions just would be different. But I think the vast majority of people are probably going to be running this on system D. So those are the instructions I'm going to follow at this point we're done. So what I'm going to do now is close Firefox here and do sudo reboot. And we're just going to reboot the machine. You can we'll be able to see that when we log back in or when we boot back up, we'll see our new display manager. So it should be coming up here pretty soon. Hopefully if everything went right, there we go right there. So the one thing I don't care for about this is that it puts the cursor in the password field first. And while that's not a big deal on subsequent logins on your first login where you've never used lie before, it's not that you know, you have to go up a level in order to actually type in your username. Once you've logged in once, it will remember your username. So it makes sense that the cursor is in the second field then, but on first login, it doesn't make much sense that it does that. So if you want to change to a different session, so say you have I three installed alongside plasma or DWM or whatever, you would just change your session here using the arrow keys. In this case, I don't have anything else installed like just have plasma. And then I'll enter my password. So like so and enter. And just like you would expect with other display manager, it does that now. In terms of configuration, there is a configuration file. So if you open up a terminal, you'll actually be able to find that configuration file in slash Etsy slash lie. So we're going to seeding to slash Etsy, L Y. And we'll do an LS here and we'll see that there's a config.ini file. So we're going to pseudo because you'll need root privileges in order to edit anything here. And then config.ini. Oh, excuse me, we're going to them config.ini. So you'll need something like them or nano in order to actually edit this. I'm going to use them because of course I am and them is not installed by default. Oh, travesty. So pseudo pack me pack man dash s them. I shouldn't have to do that. But there we go. Now we can do that. Now them installed. Okay. So here are the default and possible configurations for lies. So they're all here. You can choose to have animations enabled or not. I'm not sure actually what those look like because this is a VM. I'm not sure if they'd even work. You can choose to have a different character for the password, which is cool by the default one is always at the top. So in this case, the default for this is the asterisk. If you wanted to have a different character, you could do that. You could change the background color ID. I'm not sure what colors it supports or where this ID comes from. I'm probably guessing it comes from escape sequences. So like red, I think is like something like 33 or something. I'm not sure. I'm just guessing on my ass there. I'm not actually sure what the blank main box thing does, but you could mess around with if you want. You can set it so that it will erase the password if you have made a mistake and my default that is false probably because if you made a mistake, you can just delete part of your password and then delete up to that point and then carry on with the correct password. But you could change that to true or false. You can change the foreground color here again. I'm not sure where they're getting these color ideas. I'm wondering if they have that here somewhere. Let's, they don't have a wiki. So all the documentations here on this front page, that's a little disappointing. They don't have a little bit more documentation, but what are you going to do? Okay. Go back here. So I'm not sure where these ideas are coming from. You can remove the borders. You can remove the commands up there at the top where it tells you what to do with your F1. You can change the number of visible characters on an input. So if you have like a username that's like really long, you can make it, make it so they'll actually show everything. You can change the active language. You can load the saved desktop on logins and logins. So this is what's going to have it remember what session and what your username was. You can change the padding and the margin. You can change the input sizes. I'm not sure what the M cookie thing is and you can change the event timeout. So if I believe if you hit a failed password, it'll take that long to reset. The rest of this stuff is meant for dealing with things if you're switching between Wayland and XORG sessions. So if you need to change something, you're using Wayland or if you're using XORG, you can mess around with some of these paths. You're probably not going to have to. But if you do have to, at least this stuff here is an option for you. And that's basically all the configuration there is. Probably the most thing that I would mess around with, given that I'm not a Wayland user, I would probably mess around with the colors. Anyways, so that is lie. There's not a lot to it and there's not meant to be a lot to it. It's a display manager and it's meant to be very minimalistic. So personally, I think it's kind of awesome. I mean, I really do. And it just kind of tickles the nerd in me if that doesn't sound too dirty. It's one of those things that's just kind of cool. So that is lie. If you have comments about this, maybe you know how to change those colors. You can leave those comments in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can follow me on Massadon. Those links will be in the video description as well. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. 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