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.

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

Seatd is the light weight solution for sway and other Wayland compositors compared to elogind. When using seatd, few mandatory steps are to be performed.

Configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

Set the variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. This step is required for all Wayland compositors.

Environment variables

Additional environment variables needs to be set for all Wayland compositors to work properly with seatd:

• XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
• LIBSEAT_BACKEND=seatd
• XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway

The variable XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP must be suitably adjusted for other Compositors.

Seatd and Sway

When using seatd, sway must be started with above Environment variables and D-Bus as shown below:

Contents of ~/.profile

# Environment variables required for seatd export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland export LIBSEAT_BACKEND=seatd export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway export XDG_VTNR=$(basename "$(tty)" | sed 's/tty//') #Start sway with DBUS (only in TTY1) if [ -z "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ] && [ "$XDG_VTNR" -eq 1 ]; then exec dbus-run-session sway fi

Ensure that your shell reads and executes the if condition in .profile. Sway can also be launched with a wrapper script with seatd. If using elogind, then none of the above code snippets are required.

See Also

• seatd documentation
• sway wiki