Re: Customizing gdm

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 09:29:05PM +0900, Guillaume Proux wrote:
> George wrote:
> 
> >There was a patch a long time ago that was adding scripts (plugins, I can't
> >
> 
> is 6 months long time? maybe in the opensource world after all..

For me, a few hours is long enough to forget something.

> >reference to it, and forgot about it until today when it came to my mind 
> >with
> >respect to this.  To bad it's past feature freeze date for gnome 2.4 ... :(
> >
> I had done a change into the greeter to enable an XML element to 
> describe an executable.
> This executable when run would output some XML snippets that were added 
> in the XML tree of the gdm theme
> and parsed as usual by the greeter.
> Actually when I read around the greeter, the architecture screams for a 
> refactoring where dynamic elements could
> easily be added. Unfortunately, I have now pain in my hands due to a RSI 
> so I never did really go further down that
> path...

Eeeeeeeeek!  RSI, I almost though I had that too but it turned out to be
tendenitis.  I am being more careful nowdays.

> a screenshot (yes my desktop is in Japanese :)): this screenshot shows 
> what happens with a little script that checks my POP
> account before I log in on my personal machine...
>   * http://www.acesoliton.com/~gproux/Screenshot.png *
> a patch that applied cleanly on 2.4.1.1
>   * http://www.acesoliton.com/~gproux/dynamicgdm_patch.diff *

Slick!

And yes I agree the architecture needs a bit of work (a bit == lots) if this
is to be nicely configurable.  It would be really nice if it were possible
to make the greeter have random custom/dynamic elements that people seem
to want.  I see two things:

1) Dynamic elements, but these need some way of updating themeselves,
   such as your element above should really update if new mail arrives
2) Custom login elements, these might be done like the dynamic elements,
   but could communicated some info either to the session or the
   PreSession script.  Perhaps this could be done by allowing the
   greeter to set env variables for the session and PreSession
   script.

This would actually make the graphical greeter perhaps more usable in
situations where you need custom login kinds of stuff.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds,
   and the pessimist fears this is true.
                       -- James Branch Cabell