Seatd

Seatd is a seat management daemon, that does everything it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Depends only on libc. Seat management takes care of mediating access to shared devices (graphics, input), without requiring the applications needing access to be root.

When using elogind, seatd is not required and viceversa. Don't add both to auto-start.

Note: Reading about seatd and elogind, you might get the impression that elogind is required for polkit. But seatd/polkit works fine if you use groups in the polkit rules, only for "subject.active" elogind is required. Which means with seatd you are restricted to YES or NO rules, no AUTH_ADMIN, since agents need POLKIT_IS_ACTIVE.

Installation

apk add seatd # install seatd rc-update add seatd # configure it to auto-start service seatd start # start it now adduser $USER seat # allow current user to access seatd

If you are already logged in as a $USER, you will need to relogin.

Configuration

When seatd is used with Wayland, ensure that the following two mandatory steps are completed.

• Set the variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
• The following environment variables needs to be set:

XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
LIBSEAT_BACKEND=seatd
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway

The variable XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP must be suitably adjusted if a different Compositor is used.

Seatd and sway

When using seatd, adding the following lines to ~/.profile or other shell specific profile file will launch Sway automatically with and D-Bus only in tty1.

Contents of ~/.profile

... #start sway with DBUS (only in tty1) if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then exec dbus-run-session sway fi ...

Instead of depending on .profile or their equivalent files a wrapper script can also be used.

See Also

• seatd documentation
• sway wiki