GDM2 2.19.0 (unstable), the "Xian" Release

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

AOOH-GAH
--------

If you have no clue what GDM is, refer to the documentation links
at the bottom of this announcement.

There has been a lot of work in GDM in the 2.19 unstable branch, and
though we've made a real effort to make sure this version of GDM works
reasonably, I'm sure there are many issues that have been introduced
into the code.  The GDM development team would greatly appreciate
hearing about any issues or bugs that you find.  Link to bug tracking
tool for GDM at the bottom of this announcement.

The 2.19.0 release is an unstable release of the GNOME Display Manager
(GDM) program with the following bug fixes and improvements:

Interface Changes:

- Now the GDM PidFile is now specified as /var/run/gdm.pid and the
  GDM configuration key PidFile has been deprecated.  The location
  of the PidFile can be configured with the configure --with-pid-file
  option.  (Brian Cameron, William Jon McCann)

- The GDM AlwaysRestartServer configuration option is deprecated and
  GDM will now always restart the Xserver between users.  This makes
  GDM work more reliably since reusing the Xserver can expose memory
  leaks and instabilities in the Xserver code.  (Brian Cameron,
  William Jon McCann)

- Now the GDM LogDir is set to /var/log/gdm rather than /var/lib/log/gdm
  by default.  Users can configure this with the configure
  --with-log-file option.  (Brian Cameron)

- Remove logic to call whack_clients when closing the session.  This
  code was written to address bug #126071, to ensure that all clients
  are killed on session exit.  However, this approach does not work
  well and causes GDM to fail badly when you kill the Xserver via
  control-al-backspace on some environments.  If there is still a need
  to kill clients on session exit, a better approach will need to be
  designed.  (Cesare Tirabassi)

- Now GDM supports Xephyr as the Nested Xserver command.  GDM will use
  Xephyr by default if it is on the system, and fallback to Xnest.
  Xephyr works much better than Xnest.  (Brian Cameron)

- Now gdmgreeter will not display the Face Browser is the GDM
  configuration option Browser is false.  Now gdmsetup supports a
  "Themed with face browser" option to support selecting this.

- Comment in GDM System Defaults configuration file now shows "true"
  for ConfigAvailable since this value has been defaulting to true for
  some time and the comment in the System Defaults configuration file
  was incorrect.

- Now gdmphotosetup.desktop specifies NotShowIn=GNOME since the About-Me
  capplet is a better place for configuring the user's face image in
  GNOME.

New interfaces:

- Add min-screen-height tag to gdmgreeter parser logic so that certain
  elements in the theme will only display if the screen is large
  enough.  (Ray Strode).

- New configuration option SystemCommandsInMenu to configure which
  system commands (reboot, shutdown, suspend, etc.) appear in the GDM
  greeter system menu.   New configuration option AllowLogoutActions
  to specify which system commands are supported by the
  QUERY_LOGOUT_ACTION, SET_LOGOUT_ACTION, and SET_SAFE_LOGOUT action
  gdmflexiserver commands.  This allows GDM to be configured to support
  shutdown, reboot, suspend from the user session, but no from the login
  screen directly, if desired.  In situations where you want the user to
  authenticate before being able to shutdown or reboot the machine, this
  feature would be useful.

- GDM Now supports RBAC (Role Based Access Control) for specifying
  which actions (reboot, shutdown, suspend, etc.) are supported on a
  per-user basis.  This feature is only available if GDM is compiled
  with RBAC support enabled.  The new configuration option
  RBACSystemCommandKeys allows an RBAC key to be specified for each
  system command.  Only users who have RBAC authority will be able to
  query or set the logout action.  The GDM GUI will only display actions
  for which the "gdm" user has RBAC authority.  GDM will assume that all
  users have authority for actions which do not have an RBAC key
  associated with them.

- Now support XnestUnscaledFontPath configuration option, which allows
  GDM to work with Xnest.  Xorg 7.2 XGetFontPath function now returns
  fontpath with the ":unscaled" prefix, which Xsun Xnest cannot handle.
  Setting XnestUnscaledFontPath=false, will strip the ":unscaled" prefix
  from the fontpath so that it can work.  (Brian Cameron)

New features, improvements, and bug fixes:

- GDM had a bug that would happen after the user asked to run the
  "Configure GDM" menu choice.  If the user typed the wrong password,
  it would ask up to 3 times.  If the user typed the correct password
  on the 2nd or 3rd try, it would start a root user session rather
  than running gdmsetup.  This problem would only happen if using PAM
  for authenticating passwords.  Now GDM only asks for the root
  passwords once, and only runs gdmsetup if the password is correct.
  This bug was introduced into GDM 2.18.0 when Ludwig Nussel made some
  improvements to make the PAM logic more generic (Brian Cameron)

- Much cleanup work in the GDM code, which now makes more use of
  GObjects (e.g. XDMCP code).   Configuration logic rewritten to no
  longer use vicious-extensions and now uses GKeyFile.  (William Jon
  McCann)

- Now when a user changes the language choice in GDM, it will ask if
  the user wants to restart the GDM GUI in the selected language.
  (Takao Fujiwara, Brian Cameron)

- Many improvements supporting languages.  Now all LC_* settings are
  normalized to LANG, and input methods (IIIM->XIM) are started.
  (Hidetoshi Tajima, Chookij Vanatham)

- Fix check in gdmgreeter so that the language combo style selection
  works.  (Simon)

- Add ATK label for the entry field in gdmgreeter for better
  accessibility support.  (David Zeuthen)

- In gdmsetup, only show tar and compressed tar files in the file
  chooser for selecting gdmgreeter themes to install.  (Kristof Vansant)

- Now the "Configure GDM" option is not displayed when accessibility is
  enabled in GDM.  This is because gdmsetup currently hangs when the
  user tries to run gdmsetup from the greeter program.  Not really a
  fix, but prevents the user from getting into a situation that causes
  a system hang.  (Brian Cameron)

- Now Face Browser displays non-utf8 characters as '?' rather than
  crashing when trying to display such characters.  (Ray Strode)

- Improve GDM messages, correcting spelling and grammar mistakes
  (Brian Cameron)

- Fix detection of user specified in flexi command.  (William Jon
  McCann)

- gdmflexiserver now properly initializes GTK+.  (William Jon McCann)

- Call "xrdb -merge /etc/X11/Xresources" in the Init script so that the
  GDM GUI is properly configured with Xft rsources.  Fixes bug #301826.
  (Ray Strode)

- Now desktop categories for all GDM related desktop files should be
  correct.  (Brian Cameron)

- Fix gdm startup script so it works with Solaris /bin/sh.  (Brian
  Cameron)

- Fix a strcpy call in gui/gdmlanguages.c so source and destination do
  not overlap.  (Ray Strode)

- Remove gnome glade references since GNOME does not use libglade
  anymore.  (Kristof Vansant)

- Many improvements to GDM docs.  (Brian Cameron, William Jon McCann)

- Translation updates (Djihed Afifi, Takeshi AIHANA, Leonardo
  Ferreira Fontenelle, Jakub Friedl, Pema Geyleg, Priit Laes, Duarte
  Loreto, Kjartan Maraas, Daniel Nylander, Kostas Papadimas, Ignacio
  Casal Quinteiro, Hendrik Richter, Funda Wang)

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>.
Much work has been done on GDM2 by George Lebl; and Brian Cameron
now currently shares maintainership duties with the Queen of England.

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.

#ifndef GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...
#endif /* GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED */

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

Online Documentation - http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/
Latest Stable        - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.18/
Latest Unstable      - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.19/
Bug Reporting        - http://bugzilla.gnome.org in the "gdm" category.

Have fun,

Brian