ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.3, the "The fish is fine" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

OINKOINK

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

I cherish the many occasions on which I realize that the whole X setup
stuff is so utterly screwed.  And furthermore that every system and
distribution screws it up even further by a weird set of broken scripts.
How lovely.

#include "rant-about-distributors-replacing-scripts-with-broken-ones.h"

Anyway, there's also more busy-cursorage and other fixes then to the scripts.
Perhaps one of the more important ones being that the default background
color is now different.  My gf was telling me that the default color on
her windows box was ugly, then I realized that we have the same damn color
as the default for gdm.  So as you see I had to change the default color to
something nicer.  So I changed it to the color that ximian uses as that one
is pretty nice looking.  I didn't really mind the puke green background, but
I'm not someone with any artistic sense at all.

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 2.4.0.3:

- My girlfriend doesn't like that ugly green color that is used as the
  default so use the one that ximian is using since that one is pretty cool.

- Update the session scripts (especially the Xsession) setup and update the Pre
  and Post scripts to be all nice and all that.  This fixes a whole bunch of
  weird problems.

- Run gnome-volume-control -i in gnomerc

- When the users shell is some weird binary name (something that we don't know
  if it is a shell or not) run users session in bash or sh.  should fix #64662

- Make sessreg very happy.  Should fix sessreg issues on BSD, and now
  sessreg registers the correct pid with the utmp/wtmp so it all works
  out nicely

- Run xmodmap with the default Xmodmap in the Init script, this might fix
  #86098

- Fix the error display to be nicer and wider

- In main server wake up the main loop on signals, this may fix some
  non-linux issues on systems where poll is not woken up by signals

- Apply a few ximain patches, or at least do changes inspired by them

- Some cleanups/fixes of places where unix is very weird and could cause
  problems in fringe cases

- The gdmXnestchooser now works much better in the Xnest only mode, that
  is on rh 7.3 it now actually works again.  You can also start it only
  as gdmXnest to get the pure Xnest only mode.  This would be the user
  friendly way of starting Xnest.

- Add busy cursor when starting the configurator, and a busy cursor when
  restarting the greeter

- Fix restoring the window order after we change the greeter, fixes #88533
  (The window was disappearing before)

- Happygnome theme yet again fixed (Frederic Crozat)

- 24 hour clock preference now on the main page in gdmsetup

- gdmsetup greeter themebrowser now wraps test correctly

- Corrected some language names and added a few extra languages, fixes
  among others #88273, #88423

- Translation updates (Christian Rose, Vincent van Adrighem, Zbigniew Chyla,
  Ole Laursen, Hasbullah Bin Pit, Christophe Merlet, Changwoo Ryu,
  Kjartan Maraas, Jarkko Ranta, Jordi Mallach, Yanko Kaneti, 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:  The fish is fine.  If I fell from the same height relative to my size,
they would have to call carpet cleaners.  But this thing survived it and
seems very happy.  However in my other tank, I think I might have a puffer
with low self esteem.  Now puffers are supposed to be aggressive buggers,
but this one seems to let himself be bossed around by his tankmate, the
schizofrenic molly (schizofrenic because she already managed to drive one
other molly nuts and die).  Now she is chasing the puffer.  Mind you the
puffer has really strong teeth and the molly has none.  So I think she's
not only schizophrenic but also stupid.  Furthermore we bought some
live ghost shrimp for the puffer, but he is ignoring them.  I'm not sure he
understands that they are food.  Or perhaps we have found the humanistic
puffer.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
                       -- George Bernard Shaw