Sam Chapman .Dev | Personal Development Blog

Display Server Installation and Display Manager Configuration

Brief instructions on installing the display server and display driver on a fresh install of Arch.

Display Server

For the installation of the display manager you simply need to install the following:

  1. xorg-server
  2. Graphics card drivers:
    • nvidia-utils - For NVIDIA cards
    • catalyst-utils - For AMD cards

Display Manager

A display manager is a convenient way to start your X server. For this tutorial we'll be using lightdm as the manager, other options are available here. We'll also be using a greeter which is the logon screen that appears when you first turn on your PC options available for lightdm can be found here; lightdm-webkit2-greeter is what we'll be using.

You'll want to install the following packages:

  1. lightdm
  2. lightdm-webkit2-greeter

Open lightdm.conf:

vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Find the line starting with greeter-session in the .conf file and change it to:

greeter-session=lightdm-webkit2-greeter

Now enable the lightdm service:

systemctl enable lightdm.service