This package contains several systemd unit files related to the systemd
user session, aka systemd --user. The goal of this package is to
provide an easy way for people to collect, share and deploy systemd
user session installations and help test the systemd user session
core code.
Content:
In the "units" folder, you will find several unit files for the system domain and the user session. The most critical ones are:
user/dbus.socket and user/dbus.service - This creates the dbus session bus for the systemd user session. The session bus should live under XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, and so the user-session@.service refers to this bus address. This is needed to make dbus activation under the user session work.
default.target - not packaged. This symlink is pointing to the target unit file that should be started by systemd --user. If invalid, empty or missing, nothing will happen when you start the user session.
other - various example units are packaged for several popular Linux desktop sessions. They are examples, which work for the author, but may not necessarily function properly on other distributions.
user-session@.service is obsolete, and you should be automatically using the systemd-provided user@.service.
Prerequisites:
systemd - required. This package uses the pkg-config file from systemd to make sure items are installed in the proper locations. You should use version 186 or higher.
PAM needs to be enabled in systemd. Your system should have
pam_systemd.so used in the login or system-auth files in
/etc/pam.d.
xorg-launch-helper - currently required. Xorg by itself does not run properly as a systemd service. The xorg-launch-helper project performs this task and installs several unit files that are required for most of the units in this project to function.
dbus - current dbus code sends a malformed DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS to any dbus-activated unit under the systemd user session. A patch is pending upstream to resolve the issue. Until this is accepted, you need to either apply this patch manually to dbus yourself, or live without dbus activation. For reference, the bug is here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50962. A copy of the last-good version of the patch can be found in the /patches/ folder in this source tree. This patch is slated to be part of dbus-1.6.9 which is as of this writing not yet released.
permissions - in order for a normal user to start Xorg and control sound and/or video without seat management, the user running the session will likely need to be added to the video and audio groups, and you may have to make Xorg setuid root (4711). This is a potential security risk, so, use caution.
Installation:
Just run the usual configure --prefix...; make; make install.
Building from git requires running ./autogen.sh first.
Configuration:
There are two things that need to be done manually by the SA to enable and configure the user session properly.
1) Choose the default target (cmdline or graphical).
user-session-units ships two targets that can automatically be aliased to default.target: cmdline.target and graphical.target. cmdline.target won't start anything automatically, but serves as a target which other services can add themselves to as dependencies (think multi-user.target). graphical.target serves exactly the same purpose as the system-provided graphical.target: as well as starting cmdline.target, it starts a display server and any graphical services you choose to enable.
The default target should be set by symlinking default.target to the
target file you desire to be default. The links should be placed in
${prefix}/systemd/user/ by distributions, in ${sysconfdir}/systemd/user/
by SAs, and in ~/.config/systemd/user/ by individual users. The targets
can also be automatically linked using systemctl enable.
2) Choose your window manager, session manager, and autostarting services.
graphical.target wants two services called window-manager.service and
session-manager.service. These files should be symbolic links to the
service files for your window manager and session manager, respectively.
You may symlink these files manually as described above, or use systemctl enable to do it automatically.
To make a service automatically start, use exactly the same process as
you would for system units: either manually symlink the target to the
appropriate .wants directory in the locations listed above or use
systemctl enable.
3) Enable auto-logon/start user session at boot time (optional).
This should simply be done by the SA running: systemctl enable user-session-launch@<insert seat>-<insert uid>.service. However,
this may not work for some people, but you can manually create the
symlink like this:
ln -sf /usr/lib/systemd/system/user-session-launch@.service \ /etc/systemd/system/graphical.target.wants/user-session-launch@seat0-1000.service
Note that depending on your system, you may have to change the seat number and user ids.
This version of user-session-units requires systemd-208 or newer. Older versions are no longer supported.
Once you enable auto-logon for a user on a seat, the user-session-launch daemon will wait for the seat to appear, and tell logind to spawn a systemd --user on it. From there on, the default user units in this package can take over.
The units in this package assume you're going to be running X on :0. Although you can pass seat name, nothing inside the user session in this package is properly looking at the seat parameters yet.
Debugging:
You can connect to the user session over dbus and use regular systemctl commands to start/stop units, look at the state etc.
root> # su - joe joe> $ export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/dbus/user_bus_socket joe> $ systemctl --user
One useful thing to try is to run dbus-monitor as joe after setting the session bus address. It will show you if the session bus is functional.
The system journal should capture all messages output by user session services. The user is currently not able to see those messages if you disabled persistent journal logging (IOW, if you don't have /var/log/journal).
Download release tarballs here: http://foo-projects.org/~sofar/user-session-units/