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Friday, 24 December 2021

06:39 PM

Monthly Report - November [blogs.perl.org] 06:39 PM, Friday, 24 December 2021 02:00 PM, Friday, 24 December 2021

Time to relax before ...

What a shame, I delayed the Monthy Report once again. Although I did manage to publish last month on time i.e. 4th Nov.

Do I have reason to justify the delay?

Well, December, is always the busiest month. It is the month when I spend more time with family than ususal. Also I was busy with the Advent Calendar 2021.

As you must have guessed, today I am done with the final gift. Hence, the monthly report is getting time. There was another reason for the delay as I started Live Coding again. I have done few, which I will talk about in the end of year report in a week time, insha-ALLAH.

So, what was the highlight of last month?

I started the 1000 days FREE T-shirt campaign. I am so grateful for all the support that I received so far. It feels great. I decided to gift FREE specially designed T-shirt to all the champions of The Weekly Challenge. I am done with the most difficult phase of the campaign i.e. collecting funds. Thanks to all the sponsors, we have collected £1029.64 in total. The fund is enough to cover the cost of T-shirt printing and international delivery as per my own estimation.

As of today, I have received 32 confirmations out of 53 eligible members. I am not in a rush to be honest. I would want to gift each and every eligible members unless anyone says the opposite. I am hoping after the holiday break they will find time to respond to my email request. You can find the regular update to the campaign in the blog here.

I find it hard to remember what I did last month, every time the monthly report gets delayed. Never mind, I will cover up in the annual report in a week time if I remember anything later.

I wish you all Merry Christmas and stay safe with your loved ones.

Let's take a quick look through last month main activities.


Pull Request

5 Pull Requests submitted in the month of November 2021.

2374 Pull Requests altogether.


Git Commits

718 commits recorded in the month of November 2021.

Overall 8171 commits recorded in the year 2021.


The Weekly Challenge

Following weekly challenges proposed in the month of November 2021:

And RECAPS are listed as below:


YouTube Channel

Last month, none created. However, there are plenty of videos available on my YouTube Channel. If you like the video then please do subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss the weekly fun live coding videos.


Meet The Champion

Last month, we declared Paulo Custodio as the Champion of The Weekly Challenge.

If you are interested in past champions interview then you can find it all here.


Pull Request Club

Last month, I received Net::Songkick by Dave Cross. I submitted one Pull Request and it has been accepted and merged already.

Overall participation to Pull Request Club


Perl Blog

Last month, I blogged about the Monthly Report - October and The Weekly Challenge - 1000 days.


Perl Weekly Newsletter

Last month, I edited three editions of the Perl Weekly Newsletter i.e. Issue #536, Issue #538 and Issue #540.


Past Monthly Reports

Year 2021: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct.

Year 2020: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec.

Year 2019: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec.

Year 2018: May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec.


Patreon

At the end of last month, November 2021, the following people / organisation supported me in the past or continued supporting me even today. I am humbled by their generosity.

Do you want to sponsor my work?

Please follow the Patreon page.

Thank You.

03:00 PM

Vincent Bernat: Automatic login with startx and systemd [Planet Debian] 03:00 PM, Friday, 24 December 2021 01:20 PM, Tuesday, 04 January 2022

If your workstation is using full-disk encryption, you may want to jump directly to your desktop environment after entering the passphrase to decrypt the disk. Many display managers like GDM and LightDM have an autologin feature. However, only GDM can run Xorg with standard user privileges.

Here is an alternative using startx and a systemd service:

[Unit]
Description=X11 session for bernat
After=graphical.target systemd-user-sessions.service

[Service]
User=bernat
WorkingDirectory=~

PAMName=login
Environment=XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11
TTYPath=/dev/tty8
StandardInput=tty
UnsetEnvironment=TERM

UtmpIdentifier=tty8
UtmpMode=user

StandardOutput=journal
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/chvt 8
ExecStart=/usr/bin/startx -- vt8 -keeptty -verbose 3 -logfile /dev/null
Restart=no

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

Let me explain each block:

  • The unit starts after systemd-user-sessions.service, which enables user logins after boot by removing the /run/nologin file.

  • With User=bernat, the unit is started with the identity of the specified user. This implies that Xorg does not run with elevated privileges.

  • With PAMName=login, the executed process is registered as a PAM session for the login service, which includes pam_systemd. This module registers the session to the systemd login manager. To be effective, we also need to allocate a TTY with TTYPath=/dev/tty8. When the TTY is active, the user is granted additional access to local devices—notably display, sound, keyboard, mouse. These additional rights are needed to get Xorg working rootless.1 The TERM environment variable is unset because it would be set to linux by systemd as a result of attaching the standard input to the TTY. Moreover, we inform pam_systemd we want an X11 session with Environment=XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11. Otherwise, logind considers the session idle unless it receives input on the TTY. Software relying on the idle hint from logind would be ineffective.2

  • The UtmpIdentifier=tty8 and UtmpMode=user directives are just a nice addition to register the session in /var/run/utmp.

  • The last step is to execute Xorg through startx. For logind to allow Xorg to take control of the local devices, chvt 8 switches to the allocated TTY.3 StandardOutput=journal, combined with the -verbose 3 -logfile /dev/null flags for Xorg, puts the logs from the X server into the journal instead of using a file. While equal to the default value, the Restart=no directive highlights we do not want this unit to be restarted. This ensures the loginless session is only available on boot. By default, startx runs xinitrc. If you want to run Kodi instead, add /usr/bin/kodi-standalone between startx and --.

Drop this unit in /etc/systemd/system/x11-autologin.service and enable it with systemctl enable x11-autologin.service. Xorg is now running rootless and logging into the journal. After using it for a few months, I didn’t notice any regression compared to LightDM with autologin.


  1. For more information on how logind provides access to devices, see this blog post. The method names do not match the current implementation, but the concepts are still correct. Xorg takes control of the session when the TTY is active. ↩︎

  2. Xorg could change the type of the session itself after taking control of it, but it does not↩︎

  3. There is some code in Xorg to do that, but it is executed too late and fails with: xf86OpenConsole: VT_ACTIVATE failed: Operation not permitted↩︎

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