[gdm-list] How To start a GUI with pam

[Rohan Anil <rohan anil gmail com>]

Hello everyone


i developed this http://pam-face-authentication.googlecode.com during last year google summer of code , its a Face Authentication  - pluggable authentication module.

during the time,i was using an old version of GDM (on opensuse 10.3) , when the PAM module is activated -- it starts the GUI(gtk) which shows the Webcam video with authenticate and cancel button (please look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3USMrE7WGE )


For starting the gui  , the PAM module does the following --  xauth cookie was captured by parsing /proc/$(processid)/cmdline , where process id was parsed from /tmp/.X$(displaynumber)-Lock

The pam module sets the env variable for xauthority

and the pam module contains
SYSTEM("gtkguipath &) 
which starts the GUI

the GUI and  PAM communicate through a shared Memory Space
so PAM puts the Video into a share memory , and GUI fetches it and displays
and similarly the GUI puts the commands like authenticate or cancel through shared memory

This used to work with older version (2.20)

now the problem is with the newer version of GDM
gtk_check_init() of the GUI fails
I checked the env variable for XAUTHORITY, its set
could someone help me to find the reason why gtk_check_init() fails , 

I hope someone can help me with this problem of -
starting a GTK app with GDM , this will be needed for other pam modules like fingerprint , iris etc (in the future)

also, i would like your view on how best to attain the Video Window with GDM ,patch(?) for gdm or something else



Thank you, expecting your replies

-- 
Rohan Anil
IIIrd Year Information Systems
BITS Pilani Goa Campus