ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.1.0, the "I should be working on my thesis instead" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

BLAMBLAMBLAMFLAMBLAM

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

Wow, that was a long time since any release.  My official excuse is that
I'm busy with school.  But the truth is, I ran out of imagination for release
announcements.  Come to think of it.  I still have no imagination, and most
would argue that I never did have any.

OK, so the idea of this release is to accompany gnome 2.2.  But it should
just work with gnome 2.0 just as well.  In fact it is still considered a
stable release.  Pretty much just bugs have been fixed and there isn't much
new stuff.  This has been allowed to happen due to the excuse I have given
above.

Of course some people have not been lazy like me and have actually done
some work.  So there are lots of new translations.

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 2.4.1.0:
 
- Use background color in the graphical greeter for looking nicer on
  Xinearama displays (#94554)

- Do not translate the copyright string (patch from #101729)

- Fix the shell basename hack

- Allow passing TAB to the login entry (#75939)

- Some string fixes (Alex Duggan, me)

- GDM photo setup now checks for gdm running (RH #70326 and GNOME #101653)

- Be UTF-8 safe on expanding strings (#100738)

- Can use symlinks as session files again (#95380)

- Amharic language added

- Add X-GNOME-BUGZILLA to .desktops (Fernando Herrera)

- Do not run gnome-volume-control since it no longer has the a -i option
  (Luis Villa)

- Store initial environment and use it for starting up the error gui stuff

- Use internal utf8 conversion to avoid glib crack

- Fix japanese wordwrap (Havoc, #91921)

- Unset signals in extra processes and do setsid and all such fun stuff,
  and further fixing of handling processes

- The graphical greeter can use stock tags for labels instead of having the 
  text inside the theme file.

- Translation updates (Dmitry G. Mastrukov, Zbigniew Chyla, GNOME PL Team,
  Hasbullah Bin Pit, Kjartan Maraas, Vincent van Adrighem, Artis Trops,
  Miloslav Trmac, Christophe Merlet, Daniel Yacob, Jordi Mallach,
  Ole Laursen, Christian Rose, Andras Timar, Marius Andreiana, 
  Kostas Papadimas, Yanko Kaneti, Belarusian team, Pablo Saratxaga,
  Gustavo Noronha Silva)

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/sources/gdm/2.4
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/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:  As a note on my current progress in writing my masters thesis is that
I have so far figured out how to spell Ahlfors and Beurling.  Now this is
essential knowledge in trying to study quasiconformal mappings.  As for
actually understanding what these mappings are about to be able to write
50-100 pages of things that make sense ... Well, I'm not as far in that.
Speaking of this, should go back to working ...



-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
                       -- Albert Einstein