[Mageia-dev] A note on autologin and startx

Sun Apr 8 15:24:24 CEST 2012

'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/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+