I38Lock - accessible screen locker for I38

I38Lock is an accessible screen locker for I38, based on i3lock. After starting it, you will see a white screen (you can configure the color/an image). You can return to your screen by entering your password.

It retains i3lock's behavior while adding blind-accessible password feedback:

• I38Lock forks, so you can combine it with an alias to suspend to RAM (run "i38lock && echo mem > /sys/power/state" to get a locked screen after waking up your computer from suspend to RAM)

• You can specify either a background color or a PNG image which will be displayed while your screen is locked. Note that I38Lock is not an image manipulation software. If you need to resize the image to fill the screen or similar, use existing tooling to do this before passing it to I38Lock.

• You can specify whether I38Lock should bell upon a wrong password.

• When Cthulhu or Orca is running, I38Lock sends password-entry feedback to the screen reader over its D-Bus remote-controller interface. Empty passwords are rejected locally without invoking PAM.

• I38Lock uses PAM and therefore is compatible with LDAP etc. On OpenBSD I38Lock uses the bsd_auth(3) framework.

Install

See the upstream i3lock home page.

Requirements

• pkg-config
• libxcb
• libxcb-util
• libpam-dev
• libcairo-dev
• libglib2.0-dev
• libxcb-xinerama
• libxcb-randr
• libev
• libx11-dev
• libx11-xcb-dev
• libxkbcommon >= 0.5.0
• libxkbcommon-x11 >= 0.5.0
• libxcb-image
• libxcb-xrm

Running I38Lock

To test I38Lock, you can directly run the i38lock command. To get out of it, enter your password and press enter.

For a more permanent setup, we strongly recommend using xss-lock so that the screen is locked before your laptop suspends:

xss-lock --transfer-sleep-lock -- i38lock --nofork

On OpenBSD the i38lock binary needs to be setgid auth to call the authentication helpers, e.g. /usr/libexec/auth/login_passwd.

Building I38Lock

We recommend you use the provided package from your distribution. Do not build I38Lock unless you have a reason to do so.

First install the dependencies listed in requirements section, then run these commands (might need to be adapted to your OS):

rm -rf build/
mkdir -p build && cd build/

meson setup -Dprefix=/usr
ninja

Before testing a locally built binary on Linux, install the PAM policy:

sudo install -Dm644 ../pam/i38lock /etc/pam.d/i38lock

Without this file, I38Lock refuses to lock rather than risk creating a session that cannot be unlocked.

Upstream

I38Lock is based on https://github.com/i3/i3lock.