Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

borborygmi · 2015-02-24 02:02:52

I remember reading several threads about the awful appearance of xscreensaver a while back, and I thought I would share my own setup that came out of my annoyance with xscreensaver. I think the aesthetic of it is in line with the future BunsenLabs, so I thought I would suggest it as a starting point for improvement.

I use i3lock, the imagemagick suite, and the following image, which I made from the fabric tiles in Waldorf.
Base image.

The following script writes a user-specific message onto the image before sending it to i3lock. Pretty simple.

#!/bin/bash

STRING="User: "$USER"\nType password to unlock."
IMAGE=/tmp/lock.png
convert /home/$USER/images/lockscreen.png -font x:fixed -pointsize 18 -fill "#CACACA" -gravity center -annotate +0+75 "$STRING" $IMAGE
i3lock -i $IMAGE -u
rm $IMAGE

Here's a screenshot. If people like this, please feel free to adapt it. I was thinking of maybe incorporating Ututo's flame logo, but my graphic design skills are meager and I don't have time this week. In any case, I hope BunsenLabs ships with something more pleasing to the user than xscreensaver!

EDIT: just noticed damo's user artwork thread. I think I'll replace the lock with some elements from the png - probably the flask. Will post that when I do it.

Last edited by borborygmi (2015-02-24 02:06:57)

tknomanzr · 2015-02-24 02:22:53

I dislike xsreensaver for its fugly factor and keep it turned off most of the time. I'' have to check this out.

intoCB · 2015-02-24 06:52:31

I like this idea.

johnraff · 2015-02-24 07:21:35

Nice idea! A lot of people dislike xscreensaver, and for those (...like me to be honest...) who enjoy the screen decorations it's only an apt-get away.

A simpler lock like this might well be the better default.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-02-24 08:06:36

I like this one (also based on i3lock):
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191339

smacz · 2015-02-24 09:29:35

This post reminded me of a slashdot thread that I had read recently.

I also just finished catching up on the latest Wally thread post, and saw @pvsage's comment:

pvsage wrote:

...this is an improvement over the "once you've logged in, any passerby can access all your things" permissions in Waldorf.

Going through the information from slashdot...I'm waiting on Wayland. For the time being though, I really do like i3lock, and believe that there is some serious potential there, as the default xscreensaver in Waldorf was, to my eyes, unappealing. No offense to the devs.

Also setting up a default program such as i3lock in line with @pvsage's sentiments to create a user-friendly way to (some extent) secure the desktop. Has anyone else played around with other screen lockers?

borborygmi · 2015-02-24 16:01:27

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

I like this one (also based on i3lock):
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191339

This is where I got the idea for my setup. I think this one is probably superior because the image will always fit the screen. As far as I know, i3lock doesn't resize the image. So for example, when I put this script on my netbook, I had to resize the image manually. Shouldn't be a difficult problem to overcome though.

johnraff · 2015-02-28 02:19:10

There's also been a suggestion to use light-locker. Has anyone here used it?

Milozzy · 2015-02-28 08:33:29

Right thread, I subscribe!

Thanks again Johnraff (for linking the suggestion too).

I used light-locker both on Lubuntu (it's by default) and Fedora (from COPR). It's well maintained and alive (I help a little with IT translation so I saw the development), a young project but it has already made to Jessie repos if I'm not wrong.
It also has a nice GUI for configuration.

I can add some screenshots if needed. It looks a lot like lightdm welcome screen (+1 for consistency) but it's not as minimal as i3lock I guess.

Thanks for reading!

Last edited by Milozzy (2015-02-28 08:34:29)

Nebucatnetzer · 2015-02-28 17:57:42

i3-lock looks really nice.
However when I used it on Arch it sometimes used one CPU core 100%.
I have never figured out why it happened.
But it's probably something you might want to consider.

kbmonkey · 2015-03-01 04:24:30

I have enjoyed i3lock and will welcome it, although I am not too perturbed by xscreensaver's butt-ugly input dialog. i3lock's "--pointer" option in the manpage always gives me a naughty chuckle.

I have not come across the 100% CPU usage myself @Nebucatnetzer but some research should be done surrounding this - were you using the standard notification system at the time?

spacex · 2015-03-02 01:04:04

You guys are crazy. I've just downloaded all the screensavers available for xscreensaver, and there are very many good ones. A pure thrill of nostalgia. It takes me back to the 70's and early 80's where this adventure started. I especially love the "BSOD" screensaver. Awesome. That should be the new Bunsen lockscreen ))

pvsage · 2015-03-02 02:04:37

@ew: I'm pretty sure they're talking about the dialog that pops up for authentication. 'Tis hideous.

spacex · 2015-03-02 03:08:11

pvsage wrote:

@ew: I'm pretty sure they're talking about the dialog that pops up for authentication. 'Tis hideous.

Yes it is. But it's so ugly that it almost becomes cool

pvsage · 2015-03-02 06:23:23

At least it could attempt to use a GTK theme engine though, or even use the standard bare-bones xlib toolkit. Makes Raleigh look halfway decent by comparison (and Raleigh is uglier than Redmond)!

borborygmi · 2015-03-05 03:10:03

Finally got around to this. This might be a nice starting point, if BunsenLabs chooses to go with something similar to i3lock that accepts a user-defined image. The image is now resized to fit the screen and the script no longer uses a temporary file (I'm a noob and just learned about process substitution... I have to say that's very cool!).

#!/bin/bash

STRING="User: "$USER"\nType password to unlock."
DIMENSIONS="$(xdpyinfo | grep dimensions | cut -d ' ' -f7)"
i3lock -u -i <(convert /home/$USER/images/lockscreen.png -resize "$DIMENSIONS" -pointsize 18 -fill "#CACACA" -gravity center -annotate +0+75 "$STRING" -)

johnraff · 2015-03-05 08:51:47

I've just put bunsen-lock on GitHub. https://github.com/BunsenLabs/bunsen-lock

It still uses the xscreensaver code from cb-lock, but that will probably be changed to use i3lock (likely this script) or possibly light-locker.

kbmonkey · 2015-03-05 12:06:04

@borborygmi Great script to auto-size the lockscreen background! Excellent find on using stdout 8)

nore · 2015-03-05 17:21:27

+1 for LightDM locking feature: you don't need to attach instructions to it, any newbie who can log in knows how to use it. And it is just as pretty as you make the login screen to be.
Try it and justify, why some other option would be better:

dm-tool lock

johnraff · 2015-03-06 06:18:17

^You have to have light-locker installed for that to work. ( https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=740163 )
But then it's quite simple and neat, agreed.

@borborygmi your script is also rather nice. We'll have to make a choice at some point between the simple & plain dm-lock+light-locker approach or this more decorative option. One point - it will need imagemagick to be added to the default install, which on my test system just now required a ~30MB download.

Can I also suggest some tweak to make sure the image fills the screen? Imagemagick's resize leaves white space if the aspect ratio is different from your screen. If distorting the screensaver image is OK you can do it with this:

-resize "$DIMENSIONS"\!

ie an escaped ! after the dimensions. There are other options, like cropping the image: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/

One more nitpicking suggestion - you can use awk instead of grep+cut to pick out the dimensions from xdpyinfo and save a pipe! Also it won't break if the number of spaces changes. fwiw:

DIMENSIONS="$(xdpyinfo | awk '/dimensions/{print $2}')"

borborygmi · 2015-03-06 13:15:06

@johnraff

Thanks for the pointers! Those look like good changes to make. I'll look at distorting versus cropping the image later today, although I can see that not working well in a number of cases. The issue can be avoided entirely if we just use processed screenshots like in this example (also see above). Maybe send it to grey scale and throw up the bunsen flame instead of the generic padlock image?

@nore

Yes, I think the major downside is as you say. You have to be a tinkerer to customize this setup. Maybe this was discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but does BL have a target audience - general users for example - or is it mostly intended for the existing community?

On the other hand, the interactive feature of i3lock, which I personally don't use at the moment, is pretty cool. It's a ring that lights up in different arcs around the edges when you type your password instead of an input field with a bunch of dots appearing. I was thinking that if we came up with a default lock-screen with the bunsen flame in the middle of the ring and changed the ring color (which can be done in more recent versions), it could help set BL apart from other distros. I can come up with something this weekend, if people want to explore this option...

nore · 2015-03-06 13:46:04

As much as I appreciate the aesthetics in i3lock, the ring can be very confusing at first sight. You don't see, how many characters you have written, like when a keyboard key gets stuck down for a second. Someone with two active fingers and a crappy keyboard can become very frustrated. I don't mean to discourage you from theming i3lock, please go ahead and show us your magic, I'll be among the first ones to test it.

I don't know if a target audience exists at all, but when I think about myself when I first got interested in CrunchBang, I was just about to find my inner tinkerer once again inside a bored general user. Tinky has been hiding for last two years, but now I can feel it rising up to claim its rights.

brontosaurusrex · 2015-03-06 17:32:08

i3lock certainly feels lighter and faster to restore, also if it is user-started, the usage should be self-evident.

i3lock -c 191C1E

seems to be working just fine (other than ugly font that shows in that ring for like 2 miliseconds).

or try to use a bgcolor defined with nitrogen first

i3lock -c $(sed '/^bgcolor=#\([[:xdigit:]]\{1,\}\)$/!d;s//\1/;q' ~/.config/nitrogen/bg-saved.cfg) || i3lock -c 191C1E

p.s. Also no need to lock oneself into lightdm.

I don't know if a target audience exists at all, but when I think about myself when I first got interested in CrunchBang, I was just about to find my inner tinkerer once again inside a bored general user.

The idea that green ring would bring out the tinkerer is 100% amusing

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2015-03-06 18:39:08)

johnraff · 2015-03-07 00:47:47

brontosaurusrex wrote:

p.s. Also no need to lock oneself into lightdm.

This is of course true, but the topic is "Lockscreen for BunsenLabs" where LightDM looks like being the chosen DM. It's the default for Debian's XFCE and LXDE installs. Is there a better option for Bunsen?

boromeus · 2015-03-07 05:09:57

^
xinit with its startx command seems to be far more Bunsen-ish. No DM is needed (additional bloat) and there could be a pipemenu that brings up the config file where some window managers other than Openbox would already be written, commented out. In this case replacing the WM works by just placing the # in front of the line for Openbox and deleting it from somewhere else. Easy and neat. Keeps RAM usage at the lowest compared to all the DM-s.

Last edited by boromeus (2015-03-07 05:11:10)

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#1 2015-02-24 02:02:52

Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#2 2015-02-24 02:22:53

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#3 2015-02-24 06:52:31

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#4 2015-02-24 07:21:35

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#5 2015-02-24 08:06:36

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#6 2015-02-24 09:29:35

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#7 2015-02-24 16:01:27

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#8 2015-02-28 02:19:10

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#9 2015-02-28 08:33:29

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#10 2015-02-28 17:57:42

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#11 2015-03-01 04:24:30

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#12 2015-03-02 01:04:04

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#13 2015-03-02 02:04:37

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#14 2015-03-02 03:08:11

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#15 2015-03-02 06:23:23

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#16 2015-03-05 03:10:03

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#17 2015-03-05 08:51:47

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#18 2015-03-05 12:06:04

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#19 2015-03-05 17:21:27

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#20 2015-03-06 06:18:17

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#21 2015-03-06 13:15:06

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#22 2015-03-06 13:46:04

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#23 2015-03-06 17:32:08

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#24 2015-03-07 00:47:47

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

#25 2015-03-07 05:09:57

Re: Lockscreen for BunsenLabs

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