Nodm - ArchWiki

# Nodm

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Related articles

- Display manager

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Display manager.

Notes: No content to speak of, link to [1] instead (Discuss in Talk:Nodm#)

nodm is an automatic display manager which automatically starts an X session at system boot. It is meant for devices like smartphones, but can be used on a regular computer as well, if the security implications are acceptable.

The author is no longer continuing to develop, and had written a minimal autologin greeter for lightdm (lightdm-autologin-greeter-gitAUR) instead. It has the same autologin behaviour as nodm, but being based on lightdm it stays on top of modern display manager requirements.

## Installation

Install the nodm package.

## Usage

Now ensure no other display managers get started by disabling their systemd services.

After installing nodm, modify the `/etc/nodm.conf` file. Set the `NODM_USER` variable to the user which should be automatically logged in, and change the `NODM_XSESSION` variable to point to the script that starts your session. The `NODM_XSESSION` script must be executable!

    /etc/nodm.conf

    NODM_USER=user
    NODM_XSESSION=/home/user/.xinitrc

Enable `nodm.service` so nodm will be started on boot.

### Login session

For proper session handling, create pam.d file with the following content:

    /etc/pam.d/nodm

    #%PAM-1.0

    auth      include   system-local-login
    account   include   system-local-login
    password  include   system-local-login
    session   include   system-local-login

## Known issues

### Unclean poweroff/reboot

Users have reported in this issue that upon poweroff/reboot, systemd will fail to kill nodm, resulting in a delayed poweroff until systemd hard kills the remaining processes.

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- Display managers

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