Re: Windows XP-style login

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 08:47:26PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 11:24, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > to "screen" with a terminal.
> > 
> >  2. "Share my desktop" with easy GUI, means we need to be able to add
> >     VNC to any X server without restarting the X server.
> 
> Wow, is that possible?  From your description it seems so; that would be
> really cool!
> 
> I think that if we had this feature, it wouldn't be hard to add another
> feature I'd really like to see; a Windows XP style login.  I was really
> impressed when I used XP for the first time a while ago.  When the
> screensaver kicks in, you can log in not only as the current user, but
> as any other user as well.  So basically the screensaver just becomes a
> login prompt.  I find that very convenient, more than the current "New
> login" GDM thing (although that is nice).
> 

Well the big advantage of a VNC-type setup on top of X11 is that the
display is stateless (you can display the same login session multiple
times, and you can disconnect all viewers and then reconnect later).
This is what makes it similar to SunRay or the "screen" program.

There's some gdm integration to get a SunRay-like terminal server
setup; when you log on, the local system should start an X server
running only a fullscreen vncviewer and the terminal server should
start xvfb with the vncserver if it's not already running, and then
fire up a GNOME session on the xvfb, and connect the local vncviewer
to the remote vncserver. Should not be too hard to get going.

For XP-style login you could do this using the local system as a
vncserver *and* vncviewer, but it's probably more
efficient/straightforward to skip the vnc layer (as the local system
may as well run N real hardware X servers, instead of N real hardware
X servers running vncviewer, plus N xvfb).

None of this is really hard or a ton of code, IMO. Lots of bang for
the buck.

Havoc