ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.4.3 (stable), the "Unemployed again" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOF

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

Well today I'm unemployed again.  Today was my last day with Red Hat,
and tommorrow is school.  Which is really the reason for this release.
I've made a bunch of fixes over the last few days and just want to get
them out as I won't have much time as school starts.  Because of this,
I'd expect that GDM won't change much again for a while now.

On a positive note, I have not touched the random number stuff this time
around.  I'm actually quite happy with it the way it is.  

I've done yet another audit of some of the code and while I didn't find
any real issues, I did find places where the code was not anal enough to
my liking.  And I found some minor bugs too.  Now the code is truly very
anal about user files and even avoids some more truly impossible races.

Also fixed is that the graphical greeter now finally wraps long text
correctly.  There are still some issues, but overall it kind of works.
You can also now change the font of the username/password entry.

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 2.4.4.3:

2.4.4.3 stuff:

- The graphical greeter now wraps text correctly (and
  all text).  Plus you can insert \n in the welcome text
  now too (it worked for gdmlogin before) Fixes #123017

- The entry type in the graphical greeter listens to
  font and color from the normal state (it only has
  the normal state) (Anton Altaparmakov, me)

- Tweak fontsizes in the default themes to be smaller.  For
  some reason they very suddenly very huge.

- Further memory savings in the graphical greeter (though
  it may be offset by the new wrapping code which is quite
  large :)

- Another security audit, but no new security holes found,
  on the other hand lots of code changed to being
  super-anal (which is never bad in something running as
  root)

- Lots of random fixes again

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:  Did you notice that Red Hat doubled it's profits while I was employed
there?  Obviously that is my doing.  I should put it in my resume.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans...
                       -- John Lennon