[Mageia-dev] A note on autologin and startx

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Wolfgang Bornath at 07/04/12 08:50 did gyre and gimble:
> 2012/4/7 Jose Jorge <lists.jjorge at free.fr>:
>> Le 06/04/2012 22:53, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
>>
>>> Couldn't agree more. I'd say we can happily provide a tool to configure
>>> autologin, but if that is configured, it basically just sets the DM to
>>> gdm, and lets' it do the autologin.
>>>
>>> The fact that gdm is used should be mostly hidden from users.
>>>
>>>> From what I've seen, gdm seems to be the best implementation of the
>>> whole pam and authentication stuff, so this would be my personal
>>> favourite.
>>>
>>> Col
>>
>> Please note that autologin is lightweight and fast, so I use it for very old
>> systems, where even the 30Mb of RAM eaten by gdm count.
>> But I just can agree that if no one has time to fix it, we can drop it. I'll
>> be away from computers for  15 days ...
> 
> Does GDM provide change of desktop as KDM does?
> 
> My scenario: I have KDE and Gnome and Xfce installed. For system start
> I have autologin set to start KDE. 

I'm guessing you've configured this inside KDE tools rather than inside
the drak* tools? You'll see why I presume that below:

> But when I am in a KDE session I
> sometimes logout and use the upcoming KDM to start a Gnome or Xfce
> session or even a session on a vt.

If you use the autologin package, if you logout, you log back in again
straight away (it's a hook inside prefdm which starts the display
manager and it simply runs autologin if it's configured!)

Now I'd be tempted to make this a "one time operation" e.g. if autologin
works and exits, then we should write a flag somewhere to say "don't
autologin again" i.e. make it only work once.

This would solve this problem.

> Does this work with GDM as well? If so I'm all in.

Yeah, but keep in mind, we wouldn't be forcing users to use gdm all the
time anyway. What I'd propose (and this is for mga3 remember), is that
if autologin was configured, we'd simply make gdm kick in and process
that autologin.

If autologin is not configured, or the user has already logged in and
has now logged out, we would just dump you to your chosen DM (i.e. KDM).

So we'd only be using GDM as a tool here, not really for it's GUI
specifically. That said, we may have to ensure that when we use gdm in
this way that it exits after the user session rather than reverting back
to it's login screen, allowing the prefdm process to be automatically
restarted and thus giving you your chosen DM.

Anyway, this can be discussed in more depth after mga2 is out the door :)

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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