Re: [gdm-list] thoughts about face browser

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

Hey Ray,

On 10/14/07, Ray Strode <halfline gmail com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> So I'd like to talk a bit about the face browser and user selection
> during login.  One problem some users run into with the current face
> browser is that it doesn't scale well with setups that have lots of
> users.
>
> It tries to take some steps to prevent from blocking too long, but in
> practice (because of network latency, etc) it doesn't provide a great
> user experience.
>
> The truth is we can really only show 10 or so users in a list before
> the list becomes inconvenient to use, anyway.
>
> What would you guys say if we designed the new face browser to
> initially only show local users by default,and then show a separator
> and a "Log in as another user...' button that would allow the user to
> type the username?
>
> I think it might also be useful if we made the face browser keep track
> of recent logins, and filter by that. The idea being that users who
> frequently do a network login on the machine would show up in the face
> browser, but network logins that never happen won't show up.
>
> thoughts?


Yeah, I've tried to start putting some ideas here:
http://live.gnome.org/GDM/NewDesign/Greeter

One problem we keep running into is that there is no good way to
intelligently query users.  Even getting a list of local users isn't
trivial.  Also we need to keep track of logins per seat.

Some other thoughts on this here:
http://live.gnome.org/GDM/NewDesign/PluginSystem

> Thinking about this a bit more, there are really a few different types
> of setups that the greeter may be faced with and that we may want to
> try to deal with some way or another:
>
> - System only has root account
> - System only has root account and one other account
> - System has a few local accounts
> - System has a few local accounts and a lot of accounts on the network.
>
> We probably don't want to encourage root login, so maybe we should
> provide a mechanism to create an account if there is only a root
> account available?

Yeah, I've already changed the default PAM configuration to disallow
root login.  And I would certainly like to have account creation tools
available.  Some thoughts on the Greeter wiki page.

> If there is only one account available, maybe we should consider doing
> the login in the background automatically?  If we do this, we should
> probably make sure the account is locked while the login is happening
> (which means we should use the factory greeter thing Jon has been
> working on?)

We can't actually do the login in the background unfortunately.  Xorg
needs to init the display in the foreground.  It is too bad really.
We could do some nice things if it were possible.

If you want to check out the factory greeter stuff just flip the #if 0
in gdm-local-display-factory.c:create_display_for_device().

Once we get seat configuration working in ConsoleKit and HAL we should
be able to detect if the seat is capable of using the factory
greeter...

Thanks for looking into it.

Jon