sxlock - simple X screen locker

Simple screen locker utility for X, fork of sflock, which is based on slock. Main difference is that sxlock uses PAM authentication, so no suid is needed.

Features

• provides basic user feedback
• uses PAM
• sets DPMS timeout to 10 seconds, before exit restores original settings
• basic RandR support (drawing centered on the primary output)

Requirements

• libX11 (Xlib headers)
• libXext (X11 extensions library, for DPMS)
• libXrandr (RandR support)
• PAM

Installation

Arch Linux users can install this package from the AUR.

For manual installation just install dependencies, checkout and make:

git clone git://github.com/lahwaacz/sxlock.git
cd ./sxlock
make
./sxlock

Running sxlock

Simply invoking the sxlock command starts the display locker with default settings.

Custom settings:

-f <font description>: modify the font.
-p <password characters>: modify the characters displayed when the user enters his password. This can be a sequence of characters to create a fake password.
-u <username>: a user name to be displayed at the lock screen.
-l : Hide password length when typing

Hooking into systemd events

When using systemd, you can use the following service (create /etc/systemd/system/sxlock.service) to let the system lock your X session on hibernation or suspend:

[Unit]
Description=Lock X session using sxlock

[Service]
User=<username>
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sxlock

[Install]
WantedBy=sleep.target

However, this approach is useful only for single-user systems, because there is no way to know which user is currently logged in. Use xss-lock as an alternative for multi-user systems.