ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.2, the "Busy cursor rules!" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKI

(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)

Stealing ideas is always far preferable to making up ones own.  Thus
this release does just that.  The greatest achievement of gdm to come
so far.  The busy cursor.  When will you see this marvel of modern
technology?  This milestone in the development of mankind?  This grand
monument to humanity?  It is before the greeter is displayed.  Yes!  Now
you will know that gdm is busy preparing a login because you see a busy
cursor rather then wait in agony watching the X cursor.

There are also other fixes and a few small enhancements.  For example on my
machine the preparation for sub process execution is now 600 us faster,
meaning your average user will save 2-3 ms a day.

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the
background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then
tells you to piss off because you forgot your password.  It does pretty much
everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much
crack.  It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer
design overall.  It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of
which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing.  The
goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to
customize or troubleshoot gdm.  It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact
extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is
still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:
=====

Highlights of 2.4.0.2:

2.4.0.2 stuff:

- Add busy cursor when we start X so that the user knows that GDM
  is busy before the greeter/chooser appears.

- Added a 'System default' language choice.  This choice will use
  whatever the system sets up elsewhere.  Also this fixes using the
  system default on *BSD

- Remove the English en locale since 'en' is not a legal locale,
  now you have to pick either american or british english.

- Fix the unresponsive behaviour when first asking for username in the
  graphical greeter, bug #83187

- Added 'Last' language choice to the graphical greeter.

- The graphical greeter follows the 24 hour clock settting (Terje Rosten)

- Update the Happy GNOME theme (Steve Fox)

- Cleanup of the IO channels all over, this fixes some FreeBSD issues
  but not all (Kesor, me)

- Added more languages and more untranslated names, bug #84290 among others,
  (Hasbullah Bin Pit, me)

- Ensure existance of file descriptors 0, 1 and 2 on startup, should fix
  some problems on very esoteric setups.

- Source /etc/profile in the gdm script

- All installed .desktop's have Encoding=UTF-8 as per the standard

- Fix the failsafe question dialog

- Fix crash and login window reparenting in the gdmwm window manager

- Corrected some yodaspeak, bug #83077

- Some more sanity fixes

- Translation updates (Christian Rose, Jordi Mallach, Ole Laursen,
  Peteris Krisjanis, Kjartan Maraas, Zbigniew Chyla, GNOME PL Team, me)

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England.  She is usually
not responsive to bug reports or feature requests.  You can try to send them
to me however.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites
most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf and gnomerc.  It will however
save backups with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Distributors, packagers.  Please, PLEASE use the standard Gnome script
when setting things up as gnome, or at least equivalently working scripts.  It
should never be OK to just exec gnome-session, that is considered bad form.
The script needs to read (if available) the ~/.gnomerc and otherwise read
the <sysconfdir>/gdm/gnomerc file.  This allows users and administrators to
setup custom startup for gnome.

Downloading:
============

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/2.0.0/sources/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS.  There is a spec file included in the tarball and it may or may
not work (it should, and it did some time ago but I haven't tried it lately).

Have fun,

George

PS:  One of my fish tried to commit suicide yesterday.  No I'm serius, it
jumped out of the aquarium and fell about 1.5 meters onto the carpet, then
probably flopped around there for a few minutes before I discovered it.
I'm not sure what was it trying to tell me, perhaps it was saying that
I shouldn't do the gdm release.  Hmmm.  Anyway it's back in the aquarium
and seems to be alive.  Perhaps it was just depressed about the state of
humanity.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
                       -- Pablo Picasso