GDM2 2.19.1 (unstable), the "Xian" Release

AOOH-GAH
--------

If you have no clue what GDM is, refer to the documentation links
at the bottom of this announcement.

This version of GDM should work much better than 2.19.0.  Many build
problems were corrected, and several annoying bugs fixed that were
introduced in the 2.19.0 release (now shutdown and reboot work from the
GNOME panel, for example).  Several new features have been implemented
and many patches from the Debian builds are now upstream, thanks
to Lo\357c Minier.

The 2.19.1 release is an unstable release of the GNOME Display Manager
(GDM) program with the following bug fixes and improvements:

- Now GDM desktop files support the optional X-Gdm-XserverArgs extension
   to the desktop files installed to /usr/share/xsessions.  This allows a
   desktop session file to specify additional Xserver flags to be used
   with the session.  This could be useful to turn on special extensions
   needed for certain accessibility features, or to use sessions that
   require special Xserver flags or extensions, etc.  Note that sessions
   that use this feature cause GDM to restart the Xserver after
   authentication.  <Ron Yorston>

- Now gdmgreeter themes support a "background=[true|false]" element to
   be specified for any item tag.  Items which have this tag set to true
   will be mapped to the root window after authentication.  This way the
   background image to be displayed can be specified for the interim
   between authentication and when the session starts.  (Frederic Crozat)

- Fix gdm_daemon_check_permissions so it resets the permissions of the
   ServAuthDir rather than LogDir.  This bug was introduced into 2.19.0.
   (Brian Cameron)

- Correct handling of AlwaysLoginCurrentSession and DoubleLoginWarning
   so they work more sensibly.  Previously they caused a silent login
   failure for non-migratable sessions (e.g. Xnest and XDMCP) if both
   were set to true.  (Brian Cameron)

- When using PAM, if it receives a PAM_AUTHINFO_UNAVAIL message, it will
   display the default "authentication failed" message.  This ensures
   that the error message is the same for invalid user and incorrect
   password, making it harder to tell whether an account is a valid one
   or not.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Avoid starting timed login timer if a username has already been
   entered.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Check for existance of a gdmgreeter theme before selecting a random
   theme.  Skip over themes that don't exist on the system.  (Lo\357c
   Minier)

- Fix a bug that was causing gdmflexiserver commands SET_LOGOUT_ACTION
   and SET_SAFE_LOGOUT action to not work.  Also fix a bug that was
   causing the gdmflexiserver command UPDATE_CONFIG to return an
   incorrect return code.  These issues were introduced in GDM 2.19.0.
   (Brian Cameron)

- Now used an unsigned character buffer in gdm_fdgetc because the GDM
   GUI sends the username/password data as utf8 and the daemon will
   interpret any character sent with its high bit set as EOF unless we
   use an unsigned buffer.  This should improve support of usernames and
   passwords which contain non-ASCII characters.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- This change should only affect Solaris users.  Add support for ctrun,
   so that when running GDM as a svc service via svcadm(1M), subprocesses
   are run in a separate contract.  This ensures that when programs in
   the user session crash, it doesn't cause a GDM restart.  (Brian
   Cameron)

- Remove unused failsafe logic from the GDM Xsession script.  For
   some time GDM has called failsafe directly from the daemon slave,
   so this code hasn't been used for some time.  (Brian Cameron)

- Improvements to how GDM sets umask.  (Peter Baumann)

- No longer unset MAIL when starting a user session, and set PWD before
   starting a user session.  This fixes problems when the user's $HOME
   directory is a symlink.  (Lo\357c Minier)

- Fix detection of Xserver so that it should work on Solaris, Debian and
   Ubuntu without needing to patch the code.  (Brian Cameron, Lo\357c
   Minier)

- Documentation and manpage improvements (Brian Cameron, Lo\357c Minier)

- Several build fixes (Saleem Abdulrasool, Ed Catmur, Jens Granseuer).

- Translation updates (David Lodge, Kjartan Maraas, Christophe Merlet)


Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp@mkp.net>.
Much work has been done on GDM2 by George Lebl; and Brian Cameron
now currently shares maintainership duties with the Queen of England.

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.

#ifndef GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...
#endif /* GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED */

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

Online Documentation - http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/
Latest Stable        - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.18/
Latest Unstable      - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.19/
Bug Reporting        - http://bugzilla.gnome.org in the "gdm" category.

Have fun,

Brian
_______________________________________________
gnome-announce-list mailing list
gnome-announce-list@gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-announce-list