Lock-screen component for Sculpt 25.10

October 28 2025 by Alexander Böttcher

When leaving your notebook, locking your displays of your running OS is crucial to avoid any kind of harm - to your system, to your data, to your employer ... Same applies to when running Sculpt OS, which provides all features, just a lock screen component needs to be configured.

Since the very early beginnings of Sculpt, I provide a very simple lockscreen component, which over this year got a more user friendly appearance then before.

If interested, you can find the component in my depot, available via Sculpt's "+" symbol in the Leitzentrale view:

 +
   -> Add
      -> alex-ab depot URL
         -> Update Index (enable networking beforehand)
            -> GUI locking ...
              -> gui lock (2025-xx-xx) ...

After downloading and installing, you need to configure it. As shown in the picture, the GUI routing have to go the "desktop lock screen". This is a special domain of the GUI multiplexer nitpicker in the Sculpt OS image, which will show the content of the component at one of the top most layers once activated.

The platform information ROM is merely used to read out and present the kernel name to you, which is nice if you switch between Sculpt/kernel versions regularly, e.g. when using a multi Sculpt@kernel image as shown and available via my Fosdem 2025 talk.

If used without special configuration, the component will ask for your password:

It will record your input and keep it just in memory.

Next time you press a key, the component will ask for the password and exit when the input matches the previously recorded password.

You may create an own launcher and add additional configuration parameter:

• If you provide a password in the configuration, the recording is skipped on each activation.

• You may adjust the creeting message at will via the "name" attribute.

• You may also configure a lockscreen global-key, on which the component will be activated.

You have to configure the key in your launcher as shown and in the

/config/nitpicker configuration:

The used label in the global-key node has to match the label as used in the policy node - so "lock_screen" - independent of the actual started component name.

With the presented configuration you are now able to configure a lock screen component for Sculpt 25.10 which can be activated via a global-key, e.g. F11.

Happy sculpting!

Credits

The source code repository is available via github. The used avatar by the gui_lock component is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license, see for more information.