September 18, 2025

Install suckless’ X display locker slock on GNU/Linux

About slock, from suckless’ site:

“Simple X display locker. This is the simplest X screen locker we are aware of. It is stable […]”

Create a directory where you’ll clone slock’s repository:

$ cd
$ mkdir ~/bin 

Move to that directory:

$ cd ~/bin

Clone the repository of slock locally:

$ git clone git://git.suckless.org/slock

If you don’t have git installed:

$ sudo apt install git

Move to the directory of slock:

$ cd slock/

Now you could follow what’s on the README of slock.

$ less README

And so run:

$ make clean install

But I use checkinstall to make a package off source code, so I run:

make clean
sudo checkinstall

Now I can run slock from any shell session by running:

$ slock

To unlock your screen type your user password — there is no prompt.

~/bin and path

You might need to add ~/bin/ to $PATH

Checkinstall

If you don’t have checkinstall see: https://yctct.com/checkinstall

About slock’s package

Checkinstall creates a package for slock:

$ ls ~/bin/slock/*deb
slock_20250917-1_amd64.deb
$ apt list slock
slock/now 20250917-1 amd64 [installed,local]

I have limited knowledge on what checkinstall does. I assume both are the same; I have not tested removing either of these packages with apt remove slock or dpkg -r slock_20250917-1_amd64.deb yet.

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