Re: Screensaver Solution Discussion

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Jeff:

> > In the case of 3b, GDM will just launch the gdm-simple-greeter, and not
> > run a new gnome-session.
> Could we still run a gnome-session for the user 'gdm'? If the gdm's
> gnome-session is still running, things look simpler.

It may be possible.  I worry that having two gnome-session processes
trying to manage the same display might have issues.  But some 
investigation would be needed to determine exactly what issues exist.
It is probably possible to make things work this way, but I imagine
that there would be some work involved to allow multiple gnome-sessions
to coexist nicely.

If we find that this approach does not work well, it might make more
sense to make GDM just launch the login GUI program without gnome-
session, as I suggested before.

> >   If it is possible for GDM to run the login
> > panel, then this should be run to give access to the a11y features (note
> > that this may require that gnome-settings-daemon be run for the "gdm"
> > user).
>
> I'm not sure what should be done to make GDM GUI show on the same
> DISPLAY.

GDM has access to the Xauth keys for each display.  This is all that is
needed to display a GUI on a display, even if it is running as a
different user.

> Since gnome-screensaver has grabbed the keyboard and mouse, it
> should allows GDM GUI to grab them again. Also GDM GUI needs to cover
> the gnome-screensaver window. I do not know whether it is easy to
> implement something like this.

Is it necessary for gnome-screensaver to grab the keyboard and mouse,
or can gnome-screensaver make a request for GDM to actually do the
grabs?  It might be necessary for some handshaking between gnome-
screensaver and GDM to make this work, including how grabs are managed.

This is probably not a trivial thing to implement, but I would say it is
probably easier than doing the work to make gnome-screensaver support
a11y as well as GDM currently does.

Brian