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Need help getting Howdy to work fully with Cinnamon and LightDM

Open rohantib opened this issue 3 years ago • 1 comments

Please describe the issue in as much detail as possible, including any errors and traces. If your issue is a camera issue, be sure to also post the image generated by running sudo howdy snapshot.


Hi, I am trying to use Howdy on my Arch Linux system with Cinnamon and LightDM. I've got it working for LightDM - it recognizes my face and allows me to skip the password. However, it doesn't work for my lock screen, which I believe is cinnamon-screensaver. Per Arch wiki I've tried adding the PAM howdy authentication to cinnamon-screensaver, system-login, system-local-login, but nothing has worked for the lock screen. Does anyone know how I can accomplish this?

Also, with lightdm, when I successfully authenticate via Howdy, it allows me to login without password, but just gives me a button to press to log in. Is there any way I can enable it to automatically login after authentication, similar to how Windows Hello accomplishes it?

I've searched for similar issues already, and my issue has not been reported yet.

Linux distribution (if applicable): Arch Linux

Howdy version (sudo howdy version): 2.6.1

rohantib avatar Jun 30 '21 20:06 rohantib

So what worked for me just now with this setup (Manjaro Cinnamon).

  1. Followed this comment but to be honest not sure if those steps were needed. I don't know how to reverse the permission change right now though to test that.
  2. In addition to editing the pam for sudo and system-local-login I had to edit the pam file for cinnamon-screensaver too for that to work in addition to the lightdm login

So sudo nano /etc/pam.d/cinnamon-screensaver which then should look like this

#%PAM-1.0

# Fedora & Arch
auth            sufficient      pam_unix.so try_first_pass likeauth nullok
auth      sufficient   pam_python.so /lib/security/howdy/pam.py

-auth      sufficient   pam_selinux_permit.so
auth       include      system-auth
auth       optional     pam_gnome_keyring.so
account    include      system-auth
password   include      system-auth
session    include      system-auth

# SuSE/Novell
#auth       include      common-auth
#auth       optional     pam_gnome_keyring.so
#account    include      common-account
#password   include      common-password
#session    include      common-session

Note that the only thing I edited in this file is the usual addition of the two howdy related lines. Important for me to get this working was adding thse before this line -auth sufficient pam_selinux_permit.so

DavidM42 avatar Nov 11 '21 10:11 DavidM42