Re: [gdm-list] Circles and Happygnome greeter themes

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Dave:

> The current unstable gdm 2.19.6 circles and happygnome greeter themes 
> have user list boxes in them.  Is there a new feature which allows them 
> to be place in the theme but enabled/disabled via configuration or are 
> the user lists there in error?

Yes, it would be handy if you could configure GDM to enable or disable
the language/session selection via the combo/list methods.  But I'm not
sure I'd bother coding a solution unless someone is actually wanting to
write a theme that would benefit from such an enhancement.

To be honest, I'm not sure that users would want to enable or disable
these because there are several mechanisms to do the same thing.

1) Go to the F10 menu and launch the session/language dialogs.  This
   could be via the Options button or by hitting F10.

2) Use buttons on the theme to launch the session/language dialogs

3) Use the combo box feature.

Most themes, I would think would probably try to stick to using one
approach, and not provide more than one at the same time.  This is
why the examples are probably not best demonstrating this feature.
None of the GDM default themese really demonstrate option #2.

Also, a while back I did a poll asking people if they thought
there were any good GDM themes that could be added to the default.
I only got one response, a vote for the GDM theme Tango:

   http://art.gnome.org/themes/gdm_greeter/1209

Note there are quite a few themes here for GDM:

   http://art.gnome.org/themes/gdm_greeter/

The only real restriction is that the theme be licensed either
GPL or a CreativeCommons license that allows Sharing and Adapting.
Themes must not be licensed with a restrictive license.  For
example, default GDM themes should probably not have not-for-profit
restrictions.

I'd be happy with the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 CreativeCommons
license that Tango uses, for example.  Unless others have objections.

   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

So if you find any themes that are really well designed that are
reasonably licensed, we should consider adding them as gdm default
themes.  Note most themes at art.gnome.org have bugs:

- They often don't define both pam-message and pam-error in the
  theme, which would cause some messages to not get displayed to
  the user (like the "enter the root password to use gdmsetup"
  message.

- They take design approach #2 above, but do not provide buttons
  for all useful functionality.  Many overlook adding buttons
  for running gdmsetup or gdmchooser, for example.

- Many themes are designed for console use, but don't have the
  proper coding to disable features properly for remote/flexi
  connections, or to add needed elements that a well written
  theme should have in these modes.

But I'm sure issues like these could be fixed.

Brian