ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.0, the "Vacation!!!" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip 5 paragraphs down first)

It is the Year Of Our Lord 2002 and thine times are dark.  For there
are not no stable GNOME 2 packages.  But fear not my gentle voyager,
for thou shall experienceth the greatest event thine eyes have ever seeeth.
Yes, here before you lies but one among those first stable packages that you
shall encounter on your voyage towards the perfect desktop of only the
holiest free softwareth.  Thus bow down before Your Saviour, Your Light In The
Dark, Your Merciful Knight, yes, Me, and do your bidding.  Yes, for thou shall
now sacrifice a virgin sheep thrice on a full moon night, and thou shalt not
eat nor drink for a full fortnight to express thine ethernal gratitude towards
... Me.

(Yes there were many other people involved much more with bringing you GNOME 2
stuff, but none of them are as arrogant, self centered and just plain assholes
as me, and thus I don't have to mention them)

Now slightly more seriously:  There are no new features over the last
development release and this is then just like the 2.3.90.6 release except for
a new version name and an inclusion of a new theme for the graphical greeter,
and some updated translations.  So that you can now actually switch between
two themes.  However it would seem approriate here to list the features that
2.4.0.0 has over 2.2.x.

 * Based on the GNOME2 platform, which gives us all the cool things that
   this brings
 * New, fully themable, graphical greeter written by Anders and Alex
 * New crack-reduced configuration program.  Morever the settings that
   you can change in the configuration program take effect immediately.
 * The daemon handles some startup and login errors in a much saner manner,
   giving better feedback and such.
 * A bunch of internal reordering and restructuring.
 * Many random fixes and small new features

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the
background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then
tells you to piss off because you forgot your password.  It does pretty much
everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much
crack.  It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer
design overall.  It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of
which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing.  The
goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to
customize or troubleshoot gdm.  It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact
extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is
still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:
=====

Highlights of 2.4.0.0:

2.4.0.0 stuff:

- New theme, "Happy GNOME" by Steve Fox

- Translation updates (Christophe Merlet, Jarkko Ranta, Mantas Kriauciunas,
  Carlos Perello Marin, Kjartan Maraas, Tőivo Leedjärv, Jordi Mallach,
  Stanislav Visnovsky, Zbigniew Chyla, GNOME PL Team, Christian Rose)

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England.  She is usually
not responsive to bug reports or feature requests.  You can try to send them
to me however.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites
most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf and gnomerc.  It will however
save backups with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Distributors, packagers.  Please, PLEASE use the standard Gnome script
when setting things up as gnome, or at least equivalently working scripts.  It
should never be OK to just exec gnome-session, that is considered bad form.
The script needs to read (if available) the ~/.gnomerc and otherwise read
the <sysconfdir>/gdm/gnomerc file.  This allows users and administrators to
setup custom startup for gnome.

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

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/pre-gnome2/sources/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS.  There is a spec file included in the tarball and it may or may
not work (it should, and it did some time ago but I haven't tried it lately).

Also I think this may be moved out of the pre-gnome2 directory but that was
the only place I thought of for now.  It will likely find it's place among
where the other GNOME 2.0.0 packages will be.

Have fun,

George

PS:  The release name is "Vacation!!!" because I'm going on vacation (well,
I've sort of been on vacation since the school ended) for 3 weeks to Europe
and thus I will not be answering any email or doing anything productive.  I'm
also about to meet my girlfriend's parents and anyone who knows me or has
read a few of these gdm release announcements knows that I should be worried.
Anyway this PS is not too silly, but I hope the openning paragraph has
redeemed me.  To be at least little silly I'll do some funny faces at the
screen now ... there.  You can't really see them, but I did them.  I swear I
did.

PS2:  I didn't have time to read email so I hope there weren't any big
problems in the last day or there will be a brown paper bag release someone
will have to make for me :)  (I've had about 20 minutes of internet time right
now, since my home connection is broken ATM)


-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses,
   not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
                       -- Dennis (the bloody peasant)