Re: Proposal for inclusion in desktop: gnome-screensaver

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Mer, 2005-10-26 at 10:31 -0700, Rob Adams wrote:
> scheme whereby the login dialog first authenticates itself to the user
> before the user typing in the password to avoid that, or a button you
> press before the login screen presents itself which is intercepted at
> the kernel level to cause the one true login prompt to appear.  Either

In Xorg that key is ctrl-alt-backspace.

> Alternatively, you could try to design the display system in such a way
> as to make it impossible to make something that looks like a login
> dialog using the APIs available to unprivileged users.  Maybe a 50 pixel
> strip at the top of the screen which can only be drawn on by the system
> login and unlock prompts.  Good luck with that one.

Some old old patches for the top status panel are available. For Xorg
and XAA acceleration it turns out to be suprisingly simple as you
register two heads (one 50 pixels high and one directly following the
rest high) with a shared accelerator. The patches I've seen do lose you
a lot of the resizing functionality however.