GNOME 2.0 and Networkable Session Management

[Jeff Waugh <jdub aphid net>]

  (I was going to post this to g-h, but it would have been inappropriate. I
  hope it doesn't get drowned out or lost on devel.)

Morning all,

A couple of things in the last few weeks have got me thinking about session
management, so with apologies to Glynn Foster, I'm going to detail them
here.

[ The two things were the discussion re: Gnome over X and it's importance to
us (from g-h last week or so), and my recent acquisition of an incredibly
underpowered (but nevertheless fun) SparcStation 10. ]

First, an example... a dream:

- Mr. Big Fat Server (aka MBFS), which stores all home directories, shares
  these via NFS and has gdm/XDCMP running.

- Mr. Woosy X Terminal (aka SS10), which uses MBFS for X.

- Mr. Cranky PC (aka Cranky), which mounts home directories from MBFS.

On SS10, I login via XDCMP, and have everything running nicely at 1152x900
over X. Some evil person decides to build a 2.4.2ac kernel on SS10, so I log
out and go to Cranky. Logging in mounts my $HOME on MBFS and gives me a dual
1600x1200 Xinerama display, and everything running locally.

(Scooby Doo or Wayne's World style dream sequence ends.)


Alright, so this can be done, but the results are pretty horrendous (or
really, just not customised appropriately). Are the components of GNOME 2.0
planned to be flexible enough to handle this? This would really affect gsm,
gconf, etc.

[ Rah-rah stuff: X is something we really have *over* other systems, and it
would be a shame not to use it. The kind of flexibility shown above would do
wonders for large installations, unis, etc. The network is a very important
feature of Gnome. ]

- Jeff


-- jdub aphid net ----------------------------- http://lazarus.aphid.net/ --

     "Everyone says they like Free Software - not everyone is ready to      
make the tough choices to make it happen." - Maciej Stachowiak, GNOME Hacker