Hello all,

rrq and I have been looking at the possibility of patching the xorg server to
use libseat[1] (and therefore either seatd itself or logind) for providing
management of video and input resources for rootless startx.

We have a first version packaged in experimental (xserver-xorg version
21.1.4-3devuan1) and would appreciate testing.

Please note this is alpha quality. Do not use it in mission critical or even
mildly important circumstances. It works (mainly) for the two of us, but will
probably be broken for you. In particular it can leave your VT stuck in graphics
mode and unresponsive. In that case sysrq SAK (Ctrl-Alt-SysRq k) may be helpful.

If you want to join in and are prepared to debug the failures that you encounter
please

- Enable experimental:

% echo 'deb http://deb.devuan.org/devuan/ experimental main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devuan-experimental.list

- apt update

- apt install xserver-xorg/experimental

- Ensure you are in the video group

- Login to a VT and test basic functionality. Does startx give you a graphical
session? Can you switch VTs? You can change backend with the LIBSEAT_BACKEND
environment variable. Does both LIBSEAT_BACKEND=seatd and LIBSEAT_BACKEND=logind
work?

The sources are available[2] with the current patch[3] against upstream if you
have any suggestions, fixes or improvements.

Thanks

LeePen and rrq

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~kennylevinsen/seatd

[2] https://git.devuan.org/devuan/xorg-server

[3] https://git.devuan.org/devuan/xorg-server/commit/4baa982564f800c70c923936441af8341026718a