Re: gdm console login

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 11:46:32AM -0700, Ryan Murray wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:26:36AM -0700, George wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 04:00:24PM -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:
> > > George, if you have any suggestions, that would be useful.
> > 
> > It is a TOTALLY USELESS feature anyway.  The only person who would at any
> [...]
> > point actually want to login only on the console is someone who is technically
> > capable, and for those people Ctrl-Alt-F1 should work wonders with NO need to
> > add more code to gdm.  Further I have no clue why someone would actually want
> > to use this instead of the rescue xterm login.  If people are worried about
> [...]
> > I'm sure you could probably count on your fingers the number of people who
> > would actually use this feature.
> 
> No, it isn't.  Several video cards are very unhappy with Ctrl-Alt-F? 
> switching while X is running, often leaving you with a locked up
> system or video corruption.  gdm also runs on operating systems where
> there isn't a concept of multiple vts, so if X is running on the
> console, that's all you get.  There is no way to get to a prompt.

Yes there is.  The rescue xterm login.  That's what it's for.  If you want a
prompt.  X is already running if gdm is running.  There is no need for yet
another mode of login.

Everybody that argues for text only login always totally ignores that you can
already get a simple prompt without starting any desktop or wm.

> While you can count on your fingers the number of people that would use it on
> a Linux system with a video card that has no vt switching problems, you'd
> find that the number is much higher outside of it.

If you cannot switch vt's then you already have a running X windows anyway
and can thus login with the xterm login to get a simple prompt.

> > the memory consumption of an X server while they're logged in, then they
> > really shouldn't be using GDM (or any other graphical login) to begin with.
> 
> As you've said, this isn't really an option for the _users_ who want the
> graphical login.  It's for the _admin_ who wants to do something quickly,
> and for whatever reason doesn't want to or cannot use xterm.  That doesn't
> mean the admin should not run gdm on their user's system, because they don't
> want a graphical login.

Why can't you use xterm?  What is the difference between running xterm in X
and being on a console?  I cannot see why I would want another couple of
hundered lines of code that run as root for a feature almost nobody will ever
use, almost nobody will ever test and which almost every distro (every sane
distro) would turn off.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that
   which should not be done at all.
                       -- Peter Drucker