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Comment by cptnapalm | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting something sort of like this for my login screen. Little box for the login, of course and a whole bunch of scary-to-everyone-but-me looking output, like hollywood (https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood). +1 if I could use the terminal emulator of my choice so cool-retro-term (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) could make it look like the screen is about to melt.

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The login screen is ultimately just a regular process. I haven't tried it but there is nothing against starting cool retro term and hollywood inside of it. The most difficult part is probably to make it display on the framebuffer. For the login itself you could then just reuse the decades old login binary that provides the login prompt you see in text mode terminals, if you like. Shouldn't be too hard.

Your login screen could be a 3d game where you have to solve a puzzle to access the password prompt.

QuakeDM =]

I did, naively, make an attempt once and it kinda sorta worked in a horrible "are you mad?" way with shell, ssh, xterm and Xephyr. It only worked with a couple of simple window managers and if you hit ^C at login prompt, it cooperatively dropped you to a prompt owned by root. Oops. Still, not bad for a relatively rapid prototype proof-of-concept.

When I looked at the Linux boot process the first time I thought this just kinda sorta works in a horrible "are you mad?" way*:-). Just short of three decades later the boot process didn't really change a lot but I don't have the same feeling about it. I just got used to it and in the end all that matters is that it works.

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