ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.4.0 (stable), the "Barn? What barn?" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

BARNBARNBARNBARNBARNBAAAAARN

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

And the moment you have all been waiting for is here.  The greatest
thing to hit the news since, ... since ... I dunno, since something
very important.  Yes new GDM stable release is out.  While the version
number hasn't changed much since 2.4.1.x, that shouldn't leave you
thinking that there haven't been many code changes.  The version
number nonsense is just to let rest of gnome kind of catch up with
version numbering.  This is a release aimed for the whole GNOME 2.4 which
should be coming shortly.  However this release of GDM should really
work with any GNOME since 2.0, so you don't have to update anything just
to get some sweet new GDM love.

Note that 2.4.4.0 is not a drop-in replacement for 2.4.1.x versions
because of the session setup changes.  See the reference documentation
on how the new session setup works (http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html).

To give you an idea of what changed between 2.4.1.x and 2.4.4.0, here's a
short list of the more important changes:

- Full reference documentation!
- Facebrowser support in the graphical greeter
- Better HIG support
- Many security improvements
- Performance and memory usage improvements
- XDMCP much more robust
- Better support for running XDMCP-only servers
- Session setup is reworked into a new common standard
  to be implemented in KDM soon
- "Proper" support for PAM making things like
  smartcard modules possible
- XDMCP chooser may be run directly from the local
  login dialog (or you can have the chooser be default)
- A PostLogin script for finer grained login setup
- Many MANY bugfixes and build fixes
- Lots of new translations
- And lots of other new features, improvements,
  and bugfixes

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 2.4.4.0 (since 2.4.2.102):

- Updated the documentation quite a bit again.

- Make the .spec file work again

- Run pam_close_session and the delete cred AFTER the
  PostSession script and all those places where we touch
  the home dir so that pam_mount works properly

- Fix error output to point to the right places

- Create log file correctly during "make install"

- Translation updates (Dafydd Harries, Alessio Frusciante, Jordi Mallach,
  Vincent van Adrighem, Ole Laursen, Stanislav Visnovsky, Abel Cheung,
  Pablo Gonzalo del Campo, Lucas 'Basurero' Vieites, Danilo Segan, 
  Laurent Dhima, Christian Neumair)

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.  It will however save backups
with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...

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

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.4/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS.  There is a spec file included in the tarball and it should
work.  So generate an rpm with

  rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz

Have fun (or whatever else you wish to be having),

George

PS:  Barn?  NASA?  Dilapidation?  No, there is none of that nonsense in
this release announcement.  It was all a rumor anyway.  There is no spoon.
Err ... barn ... I mean.  You do not need to know anything about NASA
and the Barn, and least of all you need to know about dilapidation of
said Barn, or any other barn.  If this whole story thread about NASA
and dilapidation of barns makes absolutely no sense to you.  Good.
People in black suits will not need to knock on your door and zap
your brain for knowing too much.  Whoops.  Was I not supposed to say
that ...

ZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP

... huh?

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   You have the right to food money providing of course you don't mind a little
   humiliation, investigation and if you cross your fingers rehabilitation.
                       -- The Clash