ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.2.2, the "Eeeeeek! It's the users!" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

BING BING BING BING BING BING ... BLAM!

It is that time of year again, flowers bloom, love is in the air, and there is
another GDM release.  This one, once again is dedicated to a certain part of
the population.  This time it's dedicated to the users, those poor souls
afflicted with the terrible burden of having to actually use GDM.  So this
release improves usability and friendliness in many ways.  For one, the
configurator is now documented, and the reference docs don't include completely
out of date statements either.  Secondly this release is much more resilient to
misconfiguration and other type of system hosage.  Instead of croaking with a
short message in syslog, it tries to actually inform the user about what is
going wrong and it tries hard to do the right thing.  It even now detects a
failiure of the X server and will attempt to run an X configurator (after
asking for a root password of course).

Also, since it turned out that I can't be one of the cool window manager kids
without selecting SubstructureRedirectMask on the root window, I now do that.
And since I went to all this trouble I also reparent windows and give them
a simple frame and all that good stuff.  I even ran nautilus under gdm and
it was almost usable (well not really, but it's the thought that counts).

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

Ahh, so you have no clue what gdm is?  Well if you've read this far ... let's
not get into that.  Gdm is GNOME Display Manager, the little daemon that lets
you log in to your computer.  It allows xdmcp multiple login displays,
selection of languages, multiple login sessions and generally is much cooler
then any xdm clone out there, mostly cuz it isn't an xdm clone to begin with.
I mean heck, it's even got a graphical configurator, so you don't have to use
the command line to hose your system anymore.

News:
=====

There is so much new stuff in this release it's not even funny.  I also
couldn't figure out a proper ordering for these things, so they are in
a completely random order as usual:

Highlights of 2.2.2:

- When X keeps crashing ask if we should run the X configuration
  (after asking for the root password of course:)

- Fixup shadow and crypt authentication methods

- Fix session directory reading in greeter (Rémi Cohen-Scali)

- Fix the -lwrap and other configure issues

- Better "management" of login screen windows

- The face browser actually works now (Rémi Cohen-Scali, me)

- A clock on the login window (Jonathan, me)

- The language list is now translated

- A small proggie to set your gdm browser face

- Accept clicks by the right button as if they are the first button,
  we don't know if the user is left or right handed yet

- Background color seeps through transparent images and allow limitting
  remote logins to only a color backgrounds

- Tooltips on things to make the greeter easier to understand

- AllowConfig now on by default

- Properly runs with a missing gdm.conf

- Remove old failsafe stuff and use the new builtin falisafes, which
  are much nicer

- Saner focus on all gdm windows, and give the failsafe xterm focus

- Gnome and Xsession default sessions now setup xresources and read in
  keymaps

- Default is default if no default was set and it exists (confusing huh? :)

- More Xinerama support (backgrounds, error dialogs, xterm failsafe session)

- Greeter segfault fixed when no lanugage file present

- Anti-hosification meassures.  GDM will now try to do something to allow
  itself to be fixed on some mistakes.  Rather then just aborting and leaving
  crap in the syslog.  And gdmconfig let's you see hosification as it hapens

- Updated fixed icon entry

- gdm-restart script to automate restarting of gdm by HUPing the main daemon

- Mucho fixes

- Bunch more tooltips on things

- Documentation is here! (Trevor Curtis, me)

- Updated translations (Khairulanuar Abd Majid, Christian Meyer, Ole Laursen,
  Kjartan Maraas, Christian Rose, Fatih Demir, Stanislav Visnovsky,
  Emese Kovacs, Matthias Warkus, Kjartan Maraas, Jarkko Ranta, me)

Note:  Gdm2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
is now maintained by the Queen of England.  Although when she's not answering
her email, me or Lee Mellabone usually cover for her.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install now
overwrites most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf and gnomerc.  It will
however save backups with the .orig extention 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.  Another thing is that if your distro
doesn't have gnome-core 1.4.0.3 you should probably disable the Gnome Chooser
stuff until that happens (you should update gnome-core anyway).  Third thing is
make sure to set up the X servers to run on the correct virtual terminals if
you start the gdm process before the other login thingies.  See the end of the
gdm.conf sample file.

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

To download the beast, go to:

ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/
ftp://ftp.gnome.com/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/gdm/

Have fun,

George

PS:  The experiment failed and I didn't get a single date out of the last
announcement, so I suppose the GDM-using female population to whom I am a
living deity is not that big.  Well, I tried.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   How shall we fuck off, o Lord?
                       -- Monty Python