ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.2.4.0, the "I have no life" release (and results of the gender survey)

[George <jirka 5z com>]

SPLTRGHTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

Note that if you are just interested in the results of my survey, jump to the
end of this mail.

There are many thing that you can do on a train from London to Paris.  But
being a geek, it couldn't have been anything normal, such as reading a book
or flirting with passangers of the opposite sex.  No.  I started implementing
a new way to start X servers in gdm.  And now, a little more then a month
later, I am finished.

So what is this marvel of modern technology that I am talking about?  It's
called flexible servers.  It means that a user can go to the foot menu,
go to the System submenu and select "New login" and be greeted with a new
X server with a gdm greeter to log in to.  When the session ends, the user
is dumped back to the original X server.  And this is not the end of it.
If there is Xnest installed, you can easily start a new session by clicking
"New login in a nested window".  The amount of such servers is of course
limitted.  Besides this major new feature, there are many other minor and
some major other additions and fixes.

One thing to note however is that the documentation is somewhat outdated now.
Hopefully this will be fixed soon and there will be a new release with this
out.

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

Ahh, so you have no clue what gdm is?  Well if you've read this far ... let's
not get into that.  Gdm is GNOME Display Manager, the little daemon that lets
you log in to your computer.  It allows xdmcp multiple login displays,
selection of languages, multiple login sessions and generally is much cooler
then any xdm clone out there, mostly cuz it isn't an xdm clone to begin with.
I mean heck, it's even got a graphical configurator, so you don't have to use
the command line to hose your system anymore.

News:
=====

2.2.4.0 is a network number, so I tried pinging the broadcast there,
2.2.4.255.  But it is silent.  Perhaps next version.

Highlights of 2.2.4.0:

- New unix socket protocol for controlling the daemon from outside.

- A way to add servers at runtime by any local user.  So called flexible
  servers.  That is implementing a "New login" kind of thing.  This new
  server can also be a nested login with Xnest.  In which case anyone on
  an X connection can run this.  All without the use of XDMCP and openning
  up an extra TCP port.  This is more user friendly and also this way the
  daemon can manage the servers better.

- PAM usage more correct with respect to setting credentials.  This makes
  pam_group actually work, and probably some other things

- Implement a vt open (gdmopen) alternative inside gdm itself.  This
  version is stripped down version of open and it works much better for
  gdm's purposes of it.

- Implement a local helper (if pam is used) for the password asking
  when attempting to run X configuration.  This is more friendly
  and more correct.

- Keep track of all new helper processes and kill them off on exit.
  Previously some of these could be left hanging.

- When a display number is busy, ask the user about starting the
  server on an empty display number (if no gdmopen or dialog, just
  do it)

- Keep track of the VT (on linux) of local servers and allow programs to
  query this list through the socket protocol.  Perhaps to offer the
  user a menu and a gui way to switch between logins.

- More thorough closing of file descriptors.

- Also look for 'whiptail' when looking for a 'dialog' implementation

- In the photo setup, don't require a browser to be on.  In that case,
  just warn the user.

- Some doc fixes (Kjartan Maraas)

- Added Galician (gl_ES) and Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) to the menu
  (Jesus Bravo Alvarez)

- Various minor fixes.

- RPM Epoch raised to 1 since it seems others have been in an Epoch arms
  race.

- Translation updates (Ole Laursen, Christophe Merlet, Abel Cheung,
  Jesus Bravo Alvarez, Pablo Saratxaga, Andras Timar, Zbigniew Chyla,
  Kjartan Maraas, Marius Andreiana, me)

Note:  Gdm2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
is now maintained by the Queen of England.  Although when she's not answering
her email, me or Lee Mellabone usually cover for her.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites
most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf and gnomerc.  It will however
save backups with the .orig extention first.

Note3:  Distributors, packagers.  Please, PLEASE use the standard Gnome
script when setting things up as gnome, or at least equivalently working
scripts.  It should never be OK to just exec gnome-session, that is
considered bad form.  The script needs to read (if available) the ~/.gnomerc
and otherwise read the <sysconfdir>/gdm/gnomerc file.  This allows users and
administrators to setup custom startup for gnome.  Another thing is that if
your distro doesn't have gnome-core 1.4.0.3 or later you should probably
disable the Gnome Chooser stuff until that happens (you should update
gnome-core anyway).  Third thing is make sure to set up the X servers to run
on the correct virtual terminals if you start the gdm process before the
other login thingies.  See the end of the gdm.conf sample file.

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

I installed RedHat 7.1 on my desktop machine, and at the same time I'm having
some issues with my latpop.  This means that I'm having issues with making
RPMS for i386, and the alpha RPM and the srpm will only work on systems with
rpm 4.0.  The RPMS are currently only on the 5z site (no i386 rpm yet),
however rpms should make themselves easily by just doing:

rpm -ta gdm-2.2.4.0.tar.gz

So get the tarball at:

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/stable/sources/gdm/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

And at some point soon in the future:

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/gdm/
http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/stable/redhat/SRPMS/gdm/

Have fun,

George

PS:  OK, this will be a big "PS".  Anyway, here are the results of the
survey.  As expected vast majority of gdm announcement reading population is
male.  In fact I only got one female reply which was Telsa, and she did not
follow the instructions correctly.  Instead of "READ GDM ANNOUNCEMENT" she
put "You clot" into the subject line.

In any case there are more interesting results.  One thing that became
obvious early on was the way way people noted their sex (male mostly).  Among
these 2 males felt the need to tell me they are heterosexual, two also stated
their age.  One person sent me a piece of porn (thanks by the way).  One
person also asked for a date with the Queen of England.  However I'm not sure
she's dating at this point.  One person couldn't figure out a format for
putting his gender in and asked which RFC to use.  Two people thus did
not state their genders at all.  Anyway draw your own conclusions from the
results.

So here is the distribution:

Sex:					Frequency:
--------------------------------------------------

male					14
Male					8
M					3
MALE					2
m					2
Not the one you're interested in	2
[ Did not state gender ]		2
man					1
xy					1
An X and a Y chromosone			1
Sex: Yes, but not nearly enough!	1
sex: not often enough.			1
male, I think.				1

Yes please :)
        _.
      __/|
     /  \
    ||  ||
     \__/				1

 __  __          _      ______
|  \/  |   /\   | |    |  ____|
| \  / |  /  \  | |    | |__
| |\/| | / /\ \ | |    |  __|
| |  | |/ ____ \| |____| |____
|_|  |_/_/    \_\______|______|		1

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
                       -- Monty Python