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Assume I want to simulate a login in the display manager to automate a test case. More or less this would mean a tool simulating keystrokes I guess. Is there anything out there?

Options I'm aware of, but I'm not asking for:

  • Disable the login completely using automatic login or password-less login

Using xnee you can do something similar, but sadly does not work fully:

  1. Lock your screen
  2. Run cnee (xnee) on a virtual console CTRL + ALT + F1 to record mouse movements and key strokes: cnee --record --keyboard --mouse --display :0 --out-file login.xnl. This will record mouse movements and key strokes from display :0.
  3. Switching back to X console
  4. Click into the password field, enter password and press RETURN
  5. Switch back to virtual console to stop recording with CTRL + C
  6. Run cnee to replay the captured events cnee --replay --display :0.0 --file login.xnl
  7. Immediately switch back to the X console (otherwise the commands will not be replayed there) You're logged in now.

What finally rendered the solution useless is that you have to switch to the X console, what would need to be automated, too.

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I guess you want to test the display manager and not automate the login on a physical machine. (By the way I think KDM is dropped with the release of KDE Plasma 5 and now uses SDDM instead since a couple of years.)

One possible way is to use VNC:

  • Start a x11vnc server, which starts the display manager you want to test
  • Connect with a VNC testing framework (for example T-Plan Robot)
  • Run script to sendkeys and verify login

Alternatively check out Sikuli to drive a VM (for example with VirtualBox).

  • Start a VM with the display manager visible
  • Start a Sikuli script on the host computer

Siluki might also work against a physical machine when using xrdp.

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  • It's about automating the login on a physical machine as part of a test precondition and it could be part of a test ensuring certain logins exist and work as expected.
    – munro
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 10:22
  • Now I think about it shouldn't matter to much. You should be able to run both solutions from a machine against that machine, but I think its easier if you test against a virtualmachine. This would make it scale better to.
    – Niels van Reijmersdal
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 11:07
  • I'll have a look at it. I also thought about using X forwarding.
    – munro
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 11:28
  • With X Forwarding you still have to find a way to drive, maybe xautomation.sourceforge.net works in this case, but I have never tried it.
    – Niels van Reijmersdal
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 12:10
  • Expecco is available to me -- it should be able to do this (although I have to evaluate). I also found the cnee parameter --display which did the trick. I'll add another answer describing what I did.
    – munro
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 12:48

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