Has anyone here configured armbian with a Wayland desktop, and completely free of X11?

 

How did you do it?

 

I have compiled labwc and it works great with my orange pi zero 3, with bookworm or trixie... but I can't figure out how to configure a wayland greeter.

 

I need to do this because my LCD driver can't work with X11 (panel-mipi-dbi-spi).

I got my issue resolved with labwc+greetd+nwg-hello

 

See this link https://github.com/nwg-piotr/nwg-hello/issues/43

 

Please check it and post any corrections if needed

 

Getting rpi-greeter (no python) and wf-panel-pi (combines panel and launcher in compact form) would be ideal, but not resolved yet.

 

If anyone is interested in getting rpi-greeter working, this is my partial progress, and I still cannot make it start under lightdm, without any X11:

 

sudo apt install lightdm accountsservice polkitd

sudo apt install libgtk-layer-shell-dev librsvg2-common

sudo apt install gnome-common gobject-introspection gir1.2-gtk-3.0

 

These might be needed. I installed them the day after I installed greetd and ngw-hello. Note: I am working from a minimal debian trixie image

appmenu-gtk-module-common libaccountsservice-dev gir1.2-accountsservice-1.0 liblightdm-gobject-dev liblightdm-gobject-1-0 libgtk-3-dev gnome-common nasm

 

~$ mkdir rpi-greeter ; cd rpi-greeter

wget https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/pi-greeter/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

unzip master.zip ; cd rpi-greeter-master

autogen.sh

./configure

make

sudo make install

 

Change /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with:

greeter-session=pi-greeter-labwc

 

Test with:

$ sudo lightdm --test-mode --debug

or

$ sudo systemctl start lightdm

$ journalctl -b -u lightdm.service

The error is:

 

Oct 13 22:01:49 orangepizero3 lightdm[845]: Error updating user /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User1000: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.Accounts.Error.PermissionDenied: Not authorized: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files

 

DEBUG: Could not run plymouth --ping: Failed to execute child process ?plymouth? (No such file or directory)

 

I think I am very close to getting rpi-greeter working. What could be missing?

 

I see that in a raspberry pi, the folder /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/ exists, with 3 files inside, but in armbian, it doesn't exist. Should it be created by sudo make install?

 

sudo nano /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log:

Nothing weird. Only:

[+0.07s] DEBUG: Session pid=6392: Running command /usr/bin/labwc -C /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/ (and this folder /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/ does not exist)

In raspberry: /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/ contains autostart, rc.xml and environment

 

sudo nano /var/log/lightdm/seat0-greeter.log:

** (process:6392): WARNING **: 00:23:07.745: Failed to open CK session: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.E>
00:00:00.000 [ERROR] [../src/main.c:202] XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is unset

 

The etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/autostart, etc files come from a package named raspberrypi-ui-mods

(raspberry$ dpkg -S /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/autostart)

What part of https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/raspberrypi-ui-mods would get my lightdm+labwc+rpigreeter working?

 

Copying the /etc/xdg/labwc-greeter/ folder with the 3 files, with the same permissions, allow the pi-greeter to display (it is very plain), but after entering the password, the text mode display shows for 2 seconds, then the labwc black background and cursor shows for 1/4 second, then returns to the login screen.

 

Found this error in the log:

/etc/xdg/labwc-greeter//autostart: 2: /usr/bin/kanshi: not found

 

Final part of solution:

lightdm should contain:

user-session=LXDE-pi-labwc

 

Create file /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ LXDE-pi-labwc.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Labwc Desktop on Wayland
Exec=/usr/bin/labwc

 

rpi-greeter does not allow selection of other sessions: only labwc

Edited October 17, 2025Oct 17 by robertoj