ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.2.95 (unstable), the "Yay for new features" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKEIFOO

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

[note that a stable version 2.4.1.4 came out may 5th but I didn't announce it
 because I was lazy, but there was nothing new there except translations,
 note the use of different parenthesis for this note as opposed to the
 previous note, there is no special reason for this though]

Now that I'm finished with school at least for the semester (You may now call
me ... "Master George"), I have a lot more time for working on various
features of gdm.  The feature freeze thing for GNOME 2.4 does kind of put
a damper on things, but that never stopped me before ...  So let's review
what's new:

First, the session setup is now complete broken^H^H^H^H^H^Hreworked.  This is
from the discussions with Oswald Buddenhagen, the KDM dude, so in the future
at least part of the session setup will be shared with KDM.  The way this
works is that there is only ONE session script and many .desktop files for
various sessions (only two sessions shipped though:).  Also on the KDM-GDM
unification front, face browser now reads ~/.face instead of ~/.gnome2/photo,
and the selection of language and session is stored in the ~/.dmrc file.  I
have only done these changes yesterday so it is likely that something is
seriously broken.  I have logged in myself a few times testing this, but
your mileage (or kilometrage) may vary.  Also the details of this are
subject to change if I feel particularly frisky at some point before actual
code freeze or whatnot.

In any case there's lots of other fun stuff changed, such as the PAM support
is reworked to ask for the username itself, and many other things which are
likely to break your setup.  Two things are removed too, the
LocalNoPasswordUsers is removed since it wasn't possible with the new PAM
setup, and the GNOME session chooser is gone since it wasn't really working
anyway, and all distros turned it off I think.

Oh, and there is a theme writing document in the docs/ directory of the
tarball.

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 2.4.2.95:

- Completely new session setup, born out of discussions with Oswald
  Buddenhagen, the KDM maintainer, which will bring about common session
  setup for both GDM and KDM.  We now basically have a common
  /etc/X11/dm/Sessions directory where there are .desktop files are stored
  which describe sessions and these will be shared among KDM and GDM.
  Among other things this also makes the face browser default to using
  ~/.face and the per user saved info is in ~/.dmrc

- The greeter.dtd is updated and there is theme creation documentation
  (Brian Cameron, Aidan Butler, me)

- A face browser for the graphical greeter.  This is selecting by selecting
  a theme that implements it.  Add happygnome-list which does.
  (Patrizio Bruno, me)

- The standard greeter has a GtkTreeView based face browser based on the
  new one from the graphical greeter.

- Accesibility work.  Add posibility of adding modules to the greeter through
  AddGtkModules and GtkModulesList.  Add guesture listeners.  Dwell mouse
  events.  (Niall Power, Brian Cameron)

- Attempt at getting things HIG-ified

- Add "Run XDMCP chooser" button to the system menu, which is now called
  the "Actions" menu, also allow a server type that runs a chooser by
  adding a "chooser=true" to a server definition.

- The XDMCP chooser got an overhaul internally.  Also there is an "Add"
  button to add new hosts by typing in the hostname.

- Add a PostLogin script which is run right after login succeeds but before
  any setup is done.  This can be used if the users home directory needs
  to be setup here.

- Add security/DisallowTCP which will append -nolisten tcp to all
  console displays, and this is by default true.  Fixes #87291

- PingInterval is now PingIntervalSeconds and is now in seconds, it makes no
  sense in minutes really since nobody is that patient anymore these days, also
  the comment in the config file said seconds, so I suppose this is a bugfix,
  should "fix" #103266

- Add a "Delete theme" button to gdmsetup, add a scroll window to the
  theme preview, fixes #110302 and #104757

- PAM now asks for username itself.  This made LocalNoPasswordUsers impossible,
  and so that was removed.  This way hopefully we should work with some more
  pam setups, such as smartcard ones.  Fixes issues from #106537

- The GNOME session chooser stuff is removed since it wasn't working all
  right anyway and was kind of icky.

- The F10 menu in the graphical greeter is nicer.

- When you doubleclick on the radiobutton in graphical greeter Actions
  menu, it activates the item (Mihael Vrbanec)

- There is the Welcome label and RemoteWelcome label now.  The local Welcome
  label is now just "Welcome" since "Welcome to localhost" is silly.  Also
  the graphical greeter uses this, as long as you use the stock label text.

- Check for the capslock turned on before warning about it, and also only
  mention "bad username or password" if we actually asked for a password.
  Fixes #71496

- The "subtype" field to the "show" item for the themes is gone, it was stupid
  and I hope no one used it (it wasn't documented anyhow).

- A bunch of standard pam messages are now translated inside gdm

- If there are many sessions available the graphical greeter presents
  a scrolled window, fixes #104120

- Don't set RUSER for PAM and don't set RHOST if this is a console login,
  apparently this is what it should be doing according to the Sun guys,
  fixes issues from #106537

- The loop of death is now working as it should be and is not as sensitive.
  Also the toplevel loop of death does not abort the display, but only
  disables it for 2 minutes.

- Suspend now works much better and doesn't whack the gdm process,
  fixes #108700

- When more then 50 users on the system don't put them all into
  the combobox in gdmsetup, semi-fixes #111830

- When using shadow passwords, fall back to standard if shadow is
  not available, fixes #109765 (cschelcher free fr)

- Use strerror and not g_strerror as the latter returns UTF-8,
  fixes #106655

- Set TEXTDOMAIN to GETTEXT_PACKAGE for the x keeps failing script,
  fixes #106657 (Owen Taylor)

- gdmopens are done using login shell, fixes #106658, also gdmopen
  doesn't deallocate the vt which is apparently not kosher and fixes
  #106656 (Owen Taylor, me)

- Fix RedHat #91031, prepend a dash rather then make shell argv[0] a dash
  (Michael Blandford)

- On Linux detect the runlevel and try to detect the user having run shutdown
  (from say gnome-session) and if so suspend the slave operation for 30
  seconds and wait what happens.  Most likely we'll get whacked.

- Fix typos and change some strings, #106207, #105923, #56654 among others

- gdmmktemp is gone as we have not been using it, also gdmaskpass and
  gdmopen are now in libexec

- Many minor fixes

- Build fixes (Brian Cameron, me)

- Solaris fixes (Brian Cameron, Niall Power)

- Translation updates, language additions and such (Danilo Aegan,
  Guntupalli Karunakar, Abel Cheung, me, Christian Rose, Christophe Merlet,
  Jordi Mallach, Christian Neumair, Miroslav Trmac, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo,
  Hasbullah Bin Pit, Vincent van Adrighem, Evandro Fernandes Giovanini,
  David Barzilay, Lucas 'Basurero' Vieites, Duarte Loreto, Kostas Papadimas,
  KAMAGASAKO Masatoshi, Dmitry G. Mastrukov)

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.  It will however save backups
with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...

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

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/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:  I suppose most people are completely uninterested in my fish, which is
why I keep writing about them in the PS of gdm announcements.  Though
obviously, since there hasn't been many announcements lately, you have not
heard about my fish for a while.  And that's why I'm not going to tell
you anything about my fish this time.  Actually since I gotta go finish
working on a bookshelf, I'm not going to tell you anything silly: HAH!
No silliness from me this time.  PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!  (imagine being
sprayed with with tiny drops of saliva when you are reading the PFFFT, since
that's what should happen on the receiving end)

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   A good memory is needed after one has lied.
                       -- Pierre Corneille