ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.4.2 (stable), the "Symmetric" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

WHACKAWHACKAWHACKKCAHWAKCAHWAKCAHW

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

If you are afraid to ask, yes the random number stuff has yet again been
touched.  Though obviously not the major focus of this release.  Now it's a
little less embarassing mathematically I think and is faster and gets more
entropy.  If you think this really wasn't important to do, you are right.
But I couldn't sleep and I seem to always end up hacking on random things
such as this at 3am.  Now that KDM actually does get good random numbers,
I can't bash it for this point.  Hmmm.  I can still bash XDM.

There are two major things in this release.  First is that the session
stuff got a lot of work and should now be compatible with the upcoming KDM
as implemented in KDE CVS.  As part of this I one moved gnome.desktop
and CDE.desktop (for solaris kind of people) to /usr/share/xsessions
(if prefix is /usr of course).  /etc/X11/dm/Sessions is deprecated but
still used for the built in sessions.  I also renamed Default.desktop
to default.desktop to be compatible with KDM.  SessionDesktopDir is now
a path which by default is
/etc/X11/sessions/:/etc/X11/dm/Sessions/:/usr/share/xsessions/
If you don't get your gnome.desktop session just make sure to comment
out the SessionDesktopDir key and that should pull in the built in default
then which includes the correct dir.

The second major thing is that the accessibility gesture modules now not only
build, they also work (or at least they do for me :).  They were pretty much
completely broken before.  Also they are loaded for all the different GTK+
guis gdm puts up.  So we're perhaps getting closer to actual a11y support in
GDM.

There are a lot of other bugfixes too.  And there are a few translation
updates as well.

Finally GDM dilapidates all barns that NASA did not dilapidate before.

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 2.4.4.2:

- Fix the session setup to be both back-compatible and
  fully KDM (kde 3.2) compatible, among others:
  - SessionDesktopDir is now a path
  - Change 'Default' to 'default'
  - Honour TryExec correctly
  - Other then 'default', the gnome and CDE sessions are
    now installed in /usr/share/xsessions (if prefix==/usr)

- Support SELinux

- Fix the 'switchdesk' mode and mention 'switchdesk'
  only if it's actually installed (rh #104287)

- Use the a11y modules for the chooser as well as the
  error dialogs

- Lots of dwellmouselistener and keymouselistener a11y
  modules fixing, as in they actually work now,
  among other fixes are #122944, #122658, #122616

- Default gestures for gok (David Bolter, me)

- Lots of small fixes

- Error dialogs are now crashing theme/module tolerant

- Load ~/.face.icon for kde 3.2 interoperability

- Clean up the random stuff again a bit (we get more entropy
  for less work, yay!)

- Documentation updates

- Translation updates (Alessio Frusciante, Francesco Marletta,
  Changwoo Ryu)

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.  It will however save backups
with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...

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

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/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 should
work.  So generate an rpm with

  rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz

Have fun (or whatever else you wish to be having),

George

PS:  The snails ate all our bananas.  In the aquarium that is.  Yes we had
bananas in the aquarium.  No we're not nuts.  Those are aquarium plants,
really.  Which reminds me I need to go buy real bananas.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   - I'm getting better!
   - No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
                       -- Monty Python