ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.1.1, the "Algebra is so pedestrian" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

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(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)

Busy busy busy, (or is that lazy lazy lazy?).  Anyway a few fixes were
needed and when I procrastinate with my thesis I work on gdm now :)
Again, this is a stable release for both the upcoming gnome 2.2 and gnome
2.0, whichever you run.

In actual news, people with non-C locales will now actually get a working
graphical greeter (only gnome 2.2 issue).  Also I changed the default on
AlwaysRestartServer.  It seems it is just not as safe to leave this off.
So I'd suggest that distributions make this 'true' as well.

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the
background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then
tells you to piss off because you forgot your password.  It does pretty much
everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much
crack.  It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer
design overall.  It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of
which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing.  The
goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to
customize or troubleshoot gdm.  It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact
extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is
still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:
=====

Highlights of 2.4.1.1:
 
- Workaround librsvg (new librsvg should be fixed though) for non-C locales
 
- Make language dialog in the gdmgreeter at least 400 wide (fixes #103254)
 
- Don't translate stuff coming from pam (fixes #102691)
 
- Make AlwaysRestartServer default to true as it's the safer setting
 
- Use UTF-8 rather then utf8 as apparently X gets weird if it's not "UTF-8"
  (Mike Fabian)
 
- Query the user in the case the graphical theme includes halt/reboot/suspend
  buttons. (No themes do so far afaik)
 
- Add pam_env to the pam config

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England.  She is usually
not responsive to bug reports or feature requests.  You can try to send them
to me however.

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 extension 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.

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

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.4
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS.  There is a spec file included in the tarball and it may or may
not work (it should, and it did some time ago but I haven't tried it lately).

Have fun,

George

PS:  In fish news again, the puffer is too fat I think and yesterday he
wasn't too keen on eating his worms (I wouldn't be keen on eating worms
too, but then again I'm not a puffer).  All the other green spotted puffers
are quite fat too so I'm thinking this is normal.  He's going to be on a
diet today anyway.  In the other tank we have steadily decreasing population
of neons.  This is likely due to the fact that the water is so hard you'd
need a hammer to swim.  Maybe we should sue the san diego water company
for killing our fish and causing psychological pain and suffering.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
                       -- Franz Kafka