Advanced setup

Advanced setup

In this article you will find instructions on how to enable and configure various components and nice-to-have's of this config.

These instructions are not included in the README's quick setup since they are not needed when simply trying out the desktop.

Show dashboard on startup

Add the following line in your ~/.xprofile. You can create the file if it does not exist.

touch /tmp/awesomewm-show-dashboard

Show exit screen when pressing the power key

There is a keybind in keys.lua which makes the power key show the built-in exit screen included in this configuration.

This might not work if your distribution uses systemd, since systemd-logind by default makes the power key shutdown your machine.

This is how to disable this behavior:

1. Change the line #HandlePowerKey=poweroff in /etc/systemd/logind.conf to HandlePowerKey=ignore
2. Restart systemd-logind with the following line:

   sudo systemctl kill -s HUP systemd-logind

3. From now on, pressing the power key should show the exit screen instead of shutting down your machine.

For more information, check out this Arch Wiki article.

PAM authentication through the AwesomeWM login screen

Instead of authenticating with a custom password stored in plain text inside your configuration files, it is possible to use PAM in order to do it using your regular user password in a secure way. lua-pam allows us to use PAM from within AwesomeWM.

You will need to install the pam package through your distribution's package manager and then follow the instructions to build lua-pam. After building it, you can simply copy the resulting liblua_pam.so file to your configuration directory, like so:

cp liblua_pam.so ~/.config/awesome/

If you do not want to install it, no worries! You can set a custom lock screen password in your user preferences inside rc.lua.

The lock screen will automatically determine the authentication method depending on whether lua-pam is installed or not.