The golden image logs in with agetty+startx and has no RGB controllers,
no NVIDIA card and no sound card, so the night-lockdown scripts — which
mask/stop lightdm.service and getty@.service and shell out to openrgb,
nvidia-smi and amixer — had nothing real to act on in a sandbox and
were being "verified" on the host instead.
- `vm lightdm <name>`: installs lightdm + lightdm-gtk-greeter into the
live overlay (pacman -Syu, not -S: the overlay's package database is
the image's and mirrors have rotated those versions out), configures
autologin -> i3 exactly like the host, turns tty1 back into a plain
getty, reboots the guest and proves lightdm.service is active with an
Xorg it owns. Never rebuilds the base: `vm build --force` re-seals a
new checksum while every existing sandbox still backs onto the old
file's name, which is silent qcow2 corruption.
- `vm shim <name> <tool> [exit[:N]|hang|sleep:S]`: a fake tool ahead of
the real one on PATH, every call logged with an epoch to
/var/log/vmbox-shim/<tool>.log so the host can assert what ran and in
what order. `hang` is the openrgb 1.0-2 that never returned on
2026-09-12 and defeated the curfew.
- The DISPLAY/XAUTHORITY resolver `vm run` sources becomes its own file,
guest/vmbox-x11.sh, installed by the image build and re-installed by
the lightdm switch; it now tests readability, not existence, and tries
~/.Xauthority before the startx serverauth glob, because lightdm's
Xorg -auth file is root-only.
- README: the worked example uses MIDNIGHT_SHUTDOWN_CONFIRM=y (the
installer refuses to run unattended now; `echo y |` no longer works),
and the "i2c RGB stays on the host" line is gone.
- bats: four host-side tests for shim.sh (exit, exit:N, hang, refusals).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mLnUeoJ3mUwGRTowTUH6d
