pcdm: autologin broke

[danboid]

pcdm autologin isn't working for me with both Lumina and MATE under both the latest STABLE and UNSTABLE versions with the timeout set to 0 seconds. I think it tries but fails and you end up having to login manually.

[RodMyers]

current laptop and previous BE, autologin worked here

[danboid]

Previous BE? You mean autologin worked for you before and after your last system update?

Are you running STABLE or UNSTABLE? What have you set timeout to?

[RodMyers]

virtualbox is broke upstream in FreeBSD at the moment, so previous BE, within virtualbox, UNSTABLE autologin worked.

Current UNSTABLE, autologin works for me.

never paid attention to time out, so whatever the default is

[q5sys]

Its a race condition, and Ken has already fixed this: beanpole135/pcdm@de4d11d
I'm not sure what commit the shipped package is built from.

[danboid]

I thought I'd re-open this because its been over a month since Ken said he fixed it and I'm sure UNSTABLE has been rebuilt since then, right?

[RodMyers]

UNSTABLE

let me re-quantify my answer. on initial bootup on metal and virtualbox, autologin works.

on metal, loggin out and back in , autologin DOES NOT work

[q5sys]

I'm not sure what Ken's thoughts are on the issue, but enabling auto-login when a user manually logs out seems to be opposite of the intention of 'logging out'. If you have more than one user on a system, there would be no way to EVER change users, because as soon as User A logs out they get logged back in, meaning User B can never log in.

[RodMyers]

i agree. but on my systems and in virtualbox. autologin works as advertised. was looking at outside the box approach to the "autologin" question.

i am unable to duplicate on any of my systems

[danboid]

I believe the default autologin timeout is 10 seconds, and as Rod says this does work (under UNSTABLE, at least) but setting the autologin timeout to either 0 or 1 seconds fails. I have not tried 2-9 but I want a 0 second (instant) timeout, ideally.

Some display managers, such as the Mint one, do offer an autorelogin timeout for when you have just logged out but I personally don't like nor do I understand the need for such a feature. I only want instant (0 second) autologin on initial boot to work.

[q5sys]

Since the old code only allowed timeouts of >1 second... can you set it to 2 and see if that works for you? If it works when you set it to two seconds... I'm going to guess you're not running the latest code. My system is a complete mess right now, due to testing another patch so me testing it isn't the cleanest assessment.

There's a joke in there somewhere, about the state of how busy your life is... if an extra 2 seconds at login is a problem for your daily schedule... but i'm to tired to try and find it. lol

[danboid]

Yes, 2 second timeout does autologiin OK

Is there any reason we can't have a 0 second timeout?

[q5sys]

If my understanding of the issue is correct... this is the scenario.
At a certain point PCDM loads and triggers the auto-login function. However, depending on other things that are loading at the time, PCDM may not be able to successfully launch the desktop... so instead it fails back and relaunches PCDM, which when it tries to trigger the auto-login function again... succeeds because whatever was going on during the boot process has finished.

It's a classic race condition. The 'timeout' you see and are presented with in lumina-config are just a way for the user to set a variable amount of time before logging in automatically.
This does not change the fact that you cannot launch the desktop before certain boot processes have settled. At the code level there is no '0 second' timeout. Certain things have to finish before the desktop will be able to launch. What is happening is that PCDM thinks things are settled in the boot process when in fact they are still working.
A delay has to be somewhere in PCDM so that the boot process can settle. You're getting hung up on a number in your GUI instead of understanding what's actually going on in your machine. PCDM cannot launch the desktop until certain things have finished. Right now, PCDM is attempting to and is failing as you see. The reason it works when you select 2 seconds for the timeout is that that period of time is enough for 'whatever' to finish and be settled so that PCDM can properly launch the desktop.
The solutions are:
A) Set the GUI to only allow you to select values greater than or equal to 2 seconds.
B) Put wait times in the PCDM code to offset the attempted launch of the desktop so that the boot process can settle. So a user thinks his entry of 0 actually does something.

Ken's patch did the latter. It inserted a wait method until things had settled. If you are on the latest PCDM code... we will have to extend that a little more.

No option will get you a faster login, because it's not possible to start the desktop until other processes have settled.

Would you mind running an MD5 hash on your PCDM binary? Just drop to a shell and run
md5 /usr/local/bin/PCDM-session
and let me know the hash it spits back.

[danboid]

62a25273a40370b7e6664e4fa4af601d

[q5sys]

You're not on the latest version.

[danboid]

OK, I think I might have another bug to report then. Why does the GUI update manager tell me I'm up-to-date?

[q5sys]

probably because the version in github isn't the version we are shipping. We don't recompile our packages and push them to the repo every day. The version of PCDM you have 'should' have the fix, but I'll have to check to see if PCDM is an older package.
However considering the boot time you mentioned on the forum, I'm wondering if something on your system is the reason why this is failing, things are obviously taking a lot longer to start up and run than I would expect.

[beanpole135]

Tested/verified that autologin with a delay of 0 seconds works fine with the version of PCDM from source.