ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.4.1 (stable), the "George Bush for Nobel Peace Prize" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT

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

Got your attention with the release name huh?  Well now that whole
GNOME distributions are named for triggerhappy wankers who commanded
armies that killed lots of people, I thought I'd get more recent.
I suppose now we can excpect releases like "Saddam Hussain", "Stalin"
or "Martha Stewart".

Now that the silliness is over with (is it ever over?).  There's not
much new in this release compared to 2.4.4.0 except for a little bit
of cleanup.  Also the .dmrc format written now is the same as the
one that will be in KDM when the next KDE comes out.  GDM will now
work with both versions (we now don't include the ".desktop" in
the session name).  On the downside the session directories are only
about 90% compatible and they're going to be set differently.  In 
GDM we use /etc/X11/dm/Sessions, but KDM (and some GDM version in
the very near future) will use /etc/X11/sessions and have default,
custom and failsafe built in (GDM only has failsafe built in now).

Oh well, enough of technical details.  As part of the cleanup,
I cleaned up the random number stuff a little bit and it's even
a few bits more random for people that don't have a nice hardware
randomness device or enough kernel entropy.

Also this release has more translations.

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 2.4.4.1:

- Update the manual a bit

- Some internal cleanup

- Be ultra anal with creating the user protocol socket

- Don't fall back to 'nobody' if the gdm user is not found
  (that is a horrible behaviour)

- Support and write KDM style .dmrc (KDM will use this in
  the next version).  Still KDM will use /etc/X11/sessions,
  and we're using /etc/X11/dm/Sessions, oh well, life can't
  be perfect, next time ...

- Translation updates (Andras Timar, Pablo Saratxaga, Vincent van Adrighem,
  Guntupalli Karunakar, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo, Francisco Javier F.
Serrador,
  Mugurel Tudor, Misu Moldovan, KAMAGASAKO Masatoshi, Gustavo Noronha Silva,
  Hasbullah Bin Pit, 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:  Wooga wooga wooga.  See the first line of the announcement made
sense and wasn't a random noise, so I have do do random noises here.
Eki eki wooooo, bumbglee.  Pffffft (you probably noticed I like this
sound a lot, along with "eki eki", I'm not really sure which I like
better)

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   When they kick at your front door, how're you gonna come?
   With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?
                                         -- The Clash