Locking up your Sculpt VC screen
Using Sculpt on my working machine as day-to-day OS became quite comfortable. Still, some inconvenient stayed. One specific one appeared whenever I started for lunch - I wanted to lock the screen. Currently, this functionality is missing - because of that I had to power down my machine during lunch. Obviously, this is annoying - so I started to investigate how to solve the issue.
In principle the solution with nitpicker, our low complexity GUI multiplexer, should be straight forward. Just add a domain which is layered above the other domains. Whenever a lock screen component - I named it nit_lock - gets activated, it will be displayed full-screen above all other domains. Of course, you have to explicitly admit it by a policy entry on nitpicker. Additionally, any input must go to this component. As soon as you provide your unlock passphrase, the nit_lock component is done and give back your screen.
The first prototype of it is already ready and used on a daily basis by me.
The main downside of the approach is that you need to patch the sculpt policy and thereby has to build the image by your own.
You are adventurous ? Then read ahead.
If you want to try yourself then you have to follow the instructions for building the boot image of Sculpt VC and you have to incorporate the nit_lock policy patch to your checked out branch - before you do the
make -C build/x86_64 run/sculpt KERNEL=nova
call - of course ;-).
As you can see from the nit_lock policy patch, the Sculpt VC launcher start entry supports to configure a password.
repos/gems/run/sculpt/launcher/lock-screen
<launcher pkg="alex-ab/pkg/nit_lock/2018-11-27">
<config password="" transparent="no"/>
<route>
<service name="Nitpicker"> <parent label="lock_screen"/> </service>
</route>
</launcher>
You may build the nit_pick package yourself or use my packaged version of nit_lock, as configured in the launcher snippet above.
Regarding the usage:
If you don't provide a password, but actually start the nit_lock component, the screen will turn red and it will record all your input as onetime password until you hit enter. Afterwards the screen turns to dark or stays transparent, depending on your launcher configuration (see above).
To unlock the screen you have to provide the onetime password respectively the configured password. There is no input field shown, just start typing.
The developer sources can be found on my nit_lock branch for Sculpt VC.
The specific nit_lock implementation can also be tested beforehand via the nit_lock.run script. Just check out the developer branch and do something similar to
make -C build/x86_64 KERNEL=nova run/nit_lock
I'm happy about feedback and/or feature requests.