How can I use GDM autoLogin with Kodi?

Looking at the wiki, I find it uses lightdm.

I’ve tried to put GDM in its place, but then it shows a black screen.

That’s sad.

Hrm… I have a “defunct” config — in that I don’t use it currently — with kodi.

please provide more details and some nixos config - we don’t know how you’re trying to launch kodi… perhaps via services.xserver.desktopManager.kodi.enable?

do you have gdm configured to use the kodi session?

Just like the wiki says, this works:

services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.user = "kodi";
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.autoLogin.timeout = 3;

services.xserver.desktopManager.kodi.enable = true;

users.extraUsers.kodi.isNormalUser = true;

This does not work:

services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.user = "kodi";
services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.autoLogin.delay = 1;

services.xserver.desktopManager.kodi.enable = true;

users.extraUsers.kodi.isNormalUser = true;  

EDIT: Strike that; after upgrading it seems to work;). Thanks, anyway.

i wonder if this would help?

services.displayManager.defaultSession = "kodi";

also, purely out of curiosity… why gdm?

I’m trying to solve a bigger problem;)

While I do want to automatically start Kodi, I also want the option to be able to login and use the computer. It’s a laptop in the kitchen and it should be running Kodi for my kids to watch Postman Pat, etc, but I also want to be able to login.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to start a Display Manager on tty8, with NixOS, so I’m trying this:

Log into TTY, then startx on tty8.

I do

startx :1

I have put xterm inside .xinitrc.

This does start xterm, but my keyboard and mouse doesn’t work.

I have not tried this yet, with GDM, but I was thinking it had something to do with the Display Manager.

just another possibility… you could auto login as your own user, start kodi automatically, then just alt tab out of kodi via the window manager

additionally you could run kodi with something like systemd-run to completely isolate it from your own user processes and data

just an idea :man_shrugging:


gdm logs might have something useful… maybe you need to bump up logging levels, though