GDM2 2.19.1 (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.

This version of GDM should work much better than 2.19.0.  Many build
problems were corrected, and several annoying bugs fixed that were
introduced in the 2.19.0 release (now shutdown and reboot work from the
GNOME panel, for example).  Several new features have been implemented
and many patches from the Debian builds are now upstream, thanks
to Lo\357c Minier.

The 2.19.1 release is an unstable release of the GNOME Display Manager
(GDM) program with the following bug fixes and improvements:

- Now GDM desktop files support the optional X-Gdm-XserverArgs extension
  to the desktop files installed to /usr/share/xsessions.  This allows a
  desktop session file to specify additional Xserver flags to be used
  with the session.  This could be useful to turn on special extensions
  needed for certain accessibility features, or to use sessions that
  require special Xserver flags or extensions, etc.  Note that sessions
  that use this feature cause GDM to restart the Xserver after
  authentication.  <Ron Yorston>

- Now gdmgreeter themes support a "background=[true|false]" element to
  be specified for any item tag.  Items which have this tag set to true
  will be mapped to the root window after authentication.  This way the
  background image to be displayed can be specified for the interim
  between authentication and when the session starts.  (Frederic Crozat)

- Fix gdm_daemon_check_permissions so it resets the permissions of the
  ServAuthDir rather than LogDir.  This bug was introduced into 2.19.0.
  (Brian Cameron)

- Correct handling of AlwaysLoginCurrentSession and DoubleLoginWarning
  so they work more sensibly.  Previously they caused a silent login
  failure for non-migratable sessions (e.g. Xnest and XDMCP) if both
  were set to true.  (Brian Cameron)

- When using PAM, if it receives a PAM_AUTHINFO_UNAVAIL message, it will
  display the default "authentication failed" message.  This ensures
  that the error message is the same for invalid user and incorrect
  password, making it harder to tell whether an account is a valid one
  or not.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Avoid starting timed login timer if a username has already been
  entered.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Check for existance of a gdmgreeter theme before selecting a random
  theme.  Skip over themes that don't exist on the system.  (Lo\357c
  Minier)

- Fix a bug that was causing gdmflexiserver commands SET_LOGOUT_ACTION
  and SET_SAFE_LOGOUT action to not work.  Also fix a bug that was
  causing the gdmflexiserver command UPDATE_CONFIG to return an
  incorrect return code.  These issues were introduced in GDM 2.19.0.
  (Brian Cameron)

- Now used an unsigned character buffer in gdm_fdgetc because the GDM
  GUI sends the username/password data as utf8 and the daemon will
  interpret any character sent with its high bit set as EOF unless we
  use an unsigned buffer.  This should improve support of usernames and
  passwords which contain non-ASCII characters.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- This change should only affect Solaris users.  Add support for ctrun,
  so that when running GDM as a svc service via svcadm(1M), subprocesses
  are run in a separate contract.  This ensures that when programs in
  the user session crash, it doesn't cause a GDM restart.  (Brian
  Cameron)

- Remove unused failsafe logic from the GDM Xsession script.  For
  some time GDM has called failsafe directly from the daemon slave,
  so this code hasn't been used for some time.  (Brian Cameron)

- Improvements to how GDM sets umask.  (Peter Baumann)

- No longer unset MAIL when starting a user session, and set PWD before
  starting a user session.  This fixes problems when the user's $HOME
  directory is a symlink.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Fix detection of Xserver so that it should work on Solaris, Debian and
  Ubuntu without needing to patch the code.  (Brian Cameron, Lo\357c
  Minier)

- Documentation and manpage improvements (Brian Cameron, Lo\357c Minier)

- Several build fixes (Saleem Abdulrasool, Ed Catmur, Jens Granseuer).

- Translation updates (David Lodge, Kjartan Maraas, Christophe Merlet)


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