One of the things I don't usually think about on my computer is the display manager. I only ever see it when I (re)boot my computer and then I don't see or think about it again for several days/weeks/whatever.

I've been using SLiM for a while because it's simple, basically Just Works™, and I don't have to think about it much.

Until I was testing something and had to reboot my computer a few times and had to use it a bunch of times in one day. Then I started getting annoyed with it. I don't really like the default background image, and it's annoying to have to press F1 to choose my default desktop every time I sign in. I know that these are configurable, but the program has been abandoned for over a decade. While that's not, iteself, a reason to stop using something, I decided to see what other options existed.

I found a program called, 'Ly', which is really hard to do a search for¹. It's not like most desktop managers that I've used: it is a terminal application.

Installation was pretty straightforward. I built it from Ports, and there was some post-install instructions to follow:

1. Modify /etc/gettytab

Ly:\
        :lo=/usr/local/bin/ly:\
        :al=root:

1. Modify /etc/ttys

ttyv1   "/usr/libexec/getty Ly"         xterm   on secure

1. After that, I had to make sure that my ~/.xinitrc file had a hash-bang at the top, is executable (chmod 744), and that the last line was exec $1

After a reboot, instead of seeing the normal graphical login screen, I had a black screen with a box asking me to select a session (using the arrow keys), and enter my user name and password.

I don't have a screenshot here because a screenshot of black text on a white screen seems silly.

There's a lot more configuration that I could do by modifying /usr/local/etc/ly/config.ini file that it comes with, but I only see the screen when I log in, so I don't know that I'm going to spend a lot of time customizing something that I'm going to see, on average, for less than a minute a week.

This article was posted on 10 Nov 2025 and I haven't looked at it since.