Why doesn't someone add a "Make this my default" checkbox to the GDM session chooser?
This would mean we could change our default desktop from the login screen and get rid of the Switchdesk utility altogether.
And add this to KDM as well, of course.
_________________________________________________________________ Express yourself with cool new emoticons http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/myemo
On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 01:29:08PM +0000, Steven Mackay wrote:
Why doesn't someone add a "Make this my default" checkbox to the GDM session chooser? This would mean we could change our default desktop from the login screen and get rid of the Switchdesk utility altogether. And add this to KDM as well, of course.
Older versions of GDM asked you if you wanted to switch your session permanently. This seems to be gone now, and it tells you to run switchdesk -- someone seems to have made the opposite decision, that this functionality doesn't belong in GDM.
On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 09:39, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 01:29:08PM +0000, Steven Mackay wrote:
Why doesn't someone add a "Make this my default" checkbox to the GDM session chooser? This would mean we could change our default desktop from the login screen and get rid of the Switchdesk utility altogether. And add this to KDM as well, of course.
Older versions of GDM asked you if you wanted to switch your session permanently. This seems to be gone now, and it tells you to run switchdesk -- someone seems to have made the opposite decision, that this functionality doesn't belong in GDM.
We were just trying to keep switchdesk working (I think this is a Red Hat patch to gdm), there was some elaborate rationale. There seemed to be some recent sentiment to just delete switchdesk and use the upstream gdm method.
Havoc
On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 01:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
<snip> We were just trying to keep switchdesk working (I think this is a Red Hat patch to gdm), there was some elaborate rationale. There seemed to be some recent sentiment to just delete switchdesk and use the upstream gdm method.
Havoc
Seemed as in not any more or seemed as in you guys (Red Hat) are in the process of deciding whether to switch to upstream method? Maybe adding this back into GDM would help with bugs like the following no? http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=121840 http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=121813 So, what was this "elaborate rationale" for keeping Red Hat's patch for using switchdesk? With switchdesk, I have never been able to add another WM to it's GUI (the ones in there are hardcoded?) but have been able to get an entry for it in the GDM session screen. Therefore, if there was an "Make default" on the GDM session screen, this should mean I could make the new WM permanent.
Regards, -Matt
On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 19:21, Matt Hansen wrote:
Seemed as in not any more or seemed as in you guys (Red Hat) are in the process of deciding whether to switch to upstream method?
Seemed as in I remember some discussion along those lines but I don't know if anyone finally decided.
So, what was this "elaborate rationale" for keeping Red Hat's patch for using switchdesk?
I don't remember the whole set of issues but I think it was basically so that a) switchdesk would appear to do something (it only works if you are using the "Default" gdm session which runs ~/.Xclients, so if you'd chosen a session in gdm switchdesk would seem busted) and b) so that if someone had run switchdesk historically they wouldn't get reverted to the default desktop on upgrade.
Part of the issue is that switchdesk works with startx and kdm, but I don't think we should care about that anymore honestly. kdm could have similar functionality, and in the startx case someone is using command line already and can edit .Xclients.
Havoc
On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 00:08, Havoc Pennington wrote:
't remember the whole set of issues but I think it was basically so that a) switchdesk would appear to do something (it only works if you are using the "Default" gdm session which runs ~/.Xclients, so if you'd chosen a session in gdm switchdesk would seem busted) and b) so that if someone had run switchdesk historically they wouldn't get reverted to the default desktop on upgrade.
Part of the issue is that switchdesk works with startx and kdm, but I don't think we should care about that anymore honestly. kdm could have similar functionality, and in the startx case someone is using command line already and can edit .Xclients.
Nothing elaborate about the rational:
- At that time we supported xdm, kdm, gdm, and startx - So we needed something like switchdesk - The combination of switchdesk and gdm choosing the session doesn't work correctly.
Regards, Owen
Owen Taylor said:
On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 00:08, Havoc Pennington wrote:
Nothing elaborate about the rational:
- At that time we supported xdm, kdm, gdm, and startx
- So we needed something like switchdesk
- The combination of switchdesk and gdm choosing the session doesn't work correctly.
personally, i think that the login manager shouldn't be gtk/qt/etc specific, but very much neutral as to not add requirements to the install that shouldn't have to be there.
-d
-+(duncan brown -+(duncanbrown@linuxadvocate.net -+(http://www.linuxadvocate.net
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ - against microsoft attachments
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. -- George Eliot
On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 11:22, duncan brown wrote:
personally, i think that the login manager shouldn't be gtk/qt/etc specific, but very much neutral as to not add requirements to the install that shouldn't have to be there.
All UI has to use a toolkit or it flunks a whole series of requirements (i18n, a11y, for starters). Any controls that aren't using GTK or Qt are a bug, though in some cases they're a legacy bug we'll never care to fix (e.g. "classic X" apps such as xterm).
Havoc
Hey,
On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 15:40, Owen Taylor wrote:
On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 00:08, Havoc Pennington wrote:
't remember the whole set of issues but I think it was basically so that a) switchdesk would appear to do something (it only works if you are using the "Default" gdm session which runs ~/.Xclients, so if you'd chosen a session in gdm switchdesk would seem busted) and b) so that if someone had run switchdesk historically they wouldn't get reverted to the default desktop on upgrade.
Part of the issue is that switchdesk works with startx and kdm, but I don't think we should care about that anymore honestly. kdm could have similar functionality, and in the startx case someone is using command line already and can edit .Xclients.
Nothing elaborate about the rational:
- At that time we supported xdm, kdm, gdm, and startx
- So we needed something like switchdesk
- The combination of switchdesk and gdm choosing the session doesn't work correctly.
So, the conclusion I draw from that is that we should just get rid of switchdesk. It'd be great if someone could log a bug to do that and another bug to get rid of the switchdesk specific code from GDM.
(Btw, if you do rpm --erase switchdesk, you should get the "old" GDM functionality for switching desktops)
Cheers, Mark.
On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 05:50:52PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Mark McLoughlin (markmc@redhat.com) said:
So, the conclusion I draw from that is that we should just get rid of switchdesk.
I actually thought that was the solution a while back - the only place this doesn't help is the startx case.
gdm is now handling Gnome/KDE, but shouldn't switchdesk still allow for changing startx default values?
I think I have still seen strong requests to keep that functionality.
greetings,
Florian La Roche
On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 17:50, Bill Nottingham wrote:
I actually thought that was the solution a while back - the only place this doesn't help is the startx case.
startx is a command line thing though, which means startx users are perfectly capable of editing .Xclients themselves instead of with switchdesk. Just document how to start each desktop in .Xclients...
Havoc
Havoc Pennington (hp@redhat.com) said:
On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 17:50, Bill Nottingham wrote:
I actually thought that was the solution a while back - the only place this doesn't help is the startx case.
startx is a command line thing though, which means startx users are perfectly capable of editing .Xclients themselves instead of with switchdesk. Just document how to start each desktop in .Xclients...
If you do that, might as well have GDM edit it for you.
Bill
To start off, one thing that's annoying about switchdesk is that it uses a hardcoded list of window managers. Really, it should use the sessions contained in /etc/X11/dm/ like gdm does. Obviously for the purpose of updating Xclients, any session with an Exec of default, custom, or failsafe should not be listed. I am willing to do this work.
Two other things that could be done to improve matters regardless:
Firstly, create some easier to find documentation on the whole X startup process. This would include the differences between what gdm and startx do. I have a small document on this which explains what happens on a Fedora system, and would be happy to tidy it up and contribute it to the documentation project (if someone can point out where it might be most useful).
Secondly, the naming of the "Default" session is confusing. I would prefer that we added a proper "Custom" session. Xsession already allows this, but currently behaves the same for either. I would propose that the "default" action should execute /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients only (ie: it bypasses anything the user has set). The "custom" action should be what executes your own startup files. The long descriptions of these two sessions should make it clear what they do. Eg: "Default system session - ignores any custom session"; "Custom session set in ~/.Xclients". Obviously there's the concern about backwards compatibility - especially as the current way of doing things means there are more people using "default" than there would otherwise be.
An aside: I would like to see a "failsafe" session available in the gdm selection. It just requires a session file with that as the Exec - the necessary code is already in Xsession.
On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 23:15, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Havoc Pennington (hp@redhat.com) said:
startx is a command line thing though, which means startx users are perfectly capable of editing .Xclients themselves instead of with switchdesk. Just document how to start each desktop in .Xclients...
Speaking for myself - that would be acceptable.
If you do that, might as well have GDM edit it for you.
Definitely a good option - only one tool to worry about. There are two issues though. Firstly, users who do not run a DM yet still want a tool to change their default session [for startx]. Secondly, users who want one default session for gdm, and another for startx.
If both of those groups are deemed to be capable of editing Xclients by hand then the simplest solution to please the most people is to drop switchdesk, re-enable the gdm session selection code, and make it write Xclients.
Alternatively we need to address the confusion caused by the combination of using switchdesk and gdm. If you set a default in gdm, it's not what gets used when you run startx. If you set a default in switchdesk, it's only used by gdm when "Default" is set there.
I think the issue is that there are two tasks - choosing a session for gdm, and choosing a session for startx. For former is handled fine at login time by gdm's own code (currently disabled). The problem is really when someone wants to change the gdm session whilst logged in. They use switchdesk - but switchdesk is really designed for the other task, namely choosing a session for startx.
I propose we solve this by making switchdesk suitable for both tasks - so it updates gdm (ie: set the appropriate gconf key) as well as startx (ie: writes ~/.Xclients). The default would be to change the setting of both, but you should be able to do one or the other. Obviously this requires my initial proposal (that switchdesk uses the same session list as gdm). There are varying ways you could do the UI for this - I'll try to mock up some ideas tomorrow. Again, I am willing to do the coding on this!
Comments and ideas welcome.
Hi
On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 02:14:36AM +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
I think the issue is that there are two tasks - choosing a session for gdm, and choosing a session for startx. For former is handled fine at login time by gdm's own code (currently disabled). The problem is really when someone wants to change the gdm session whilst logged in. They use switchdesk - but switchdesk is really designed for the other task, namely choosing a session for startx.
I propose we solve this by making switchdesk suitable for both tasks - so it updates gdm (ie: set the appropriate gconf key) as well as startx (ie: writes ~/.Xclients). The default would be to change the setting of both, but you should be able to do one or the other. Obviously this requires my initial proposal (that switchdesk uses the same session list as gdm). There are varying ways you could do the UI for this - I'll try to mock up some ideas tomorrow. Again, I am willing to do the coding on this!
Waited to see what differences switchdesk had in FC2... awareness of more desktops, but they're still hardcoded, and it still has the same flaws as before regarding gdm/startx usage.
So, attached is a mockup of the kind of thing I'm suggesting. Comments welcome.
If this is seen as a good solution, then I would be extremely keen to get the necessary changes into FC3, and as I mentioned above I'm happy to do the coding. Somone at RedHat just needs to say the word. :)
Cheers
Switchdesk is toast. The way we should be handling it at this point is prompting when you login to a non-default session through gdm.
"Do you want to make WindowMaker your default?" sort of thing.
-Seth
On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 13:25 +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
Hi
On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 02:14:36AM +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
I think the issue is that there are two tasks - choosing a session for gdm, and choosing a session for startx. For former is handled fine at login time by gdm's own code (currently disabled). The problem is really when someone wants to change the gdm session whilst logged in. They use switchdesk - but switchdesk is really designed for the other task, namely choosing a session for startx.
I propose we solve this by making switchdesk suitable for both tasks - so it updates gdm (ie: set the appropriate gconf key) as well as startx (ie: writes ~/.Xclients). The default would be to change the setting of both, but you should be able to do one or the other. Obviously this requires my initial proposal (that switchdesk uses the same session list as gdm). There are varying ways you could do the UI for this - I'll try to mock up some ideas tomorrow. Again, I am willing to do the coding on this!
Waited to see what differences switchdesk had in FC2... awareness of more desktops, but they're still hardcoded, and it still has the same flaws as before regarding gdm/startx usage.
So, attached is a mockup of the kind of thing I'm suggesting. Comments welcome.
If this is seen as a good solution, then I would be extremely keen to get the necessary changes into FC3, and as I mentioned above I'm happy to do the coding. Somone at RedHat just needs to say the word. :)
Cheers
On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 19:25, Seth Nickell wrote:
Switchdesk is toast. The way we should be handling it at this point is prompting when you login to a non-default session through gdm.
"Do you want to make WindowMaker your default?" sort of thing.
Yes indeed...
On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 13:25 +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 02:14:36AM +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
I think the issue is that there are two tasks - choosing a session for gdm, and choosing a session for startx. For former is handled fine at login time by gdm's own code (currently disabled).
... which as has been mentioned is exactly what the standard (upstream) session chooser already does! It also address the other problem I mentioned (of automatically picking up which "desktops" are installed - by using .desktop files). This was enabled in RH9 IIRC.
However, it does *not* address the latter task - namely, being able to select a desktop for using with startx. Now, if the consensus is that those people should edit their own .Xclients, fine - but there are already messages in this thread saying we want a tool for that.
Which is presumably why FC is currently using switchdesk - presumably to have consistency between what you get when trying to change sesson in gdm and whilst actually within a session. However, switchdesk is flawed for reasons I have already explained. Part of its functions are still needed though, so we need a replacement (or basically, to rewrite it).
To be specific, what I'm proposing is: * Change gdm to use its standard session chooser - making FC more "standard" with other GNOME desktops, closer to upstream, and giving you behaviour you mentioned above. * Rewrite switchdesk so that it offers the same list of desktops that the gdm session chooser does by using the same .desktop files. * Change the gui of switchdesk to clearly set the session for 1) logging in graphically [1], and 2) logging in on the console (ie: startx). This is what my mockup is for.
[1] Granted, this is bad because it duplicates functionality - however, users will try and change their session whilst within X. If there is a tool there that appears to do what they want, but doesn't (because it's actually only for console X startup) they *will* be confused. As most of the code will be there anyway (for .Xclients generation), the only extra thing you're adding is the code to set the gconf key or whatever gdm uses to decide what your current default session is.
When you say "Switchdesk is toast" - I agree it should be! I'm trying to discuss a replacement. Is someone in RedHat working on this, or has a decision been made regarding the startx use-case? If so, please let us know. Otherwise, I'd like to help implement this.
Cheers
Mark McLoughlin said:
(Btw, if you do rpm --erase switchdesk, you should get the "old" GDM functionality for switching desktops)
you won't really have gdm at all.
-d
[root@crazybastard root]# yum remove switchdesk Gathering header information file(s) from server(s) Server: fedora core 1 :: fedora base Server: fedora core 1 :: fedora updates Server: fedora core :: linuxadvocate.net Finding updated packages Downloading needed headers kernel-BOOT-0-2.4.22-1.21 100% |=========================| 23 kB 00:00 kernel-smp-0-2.4.22-1.218 100% |=========================| 42 kB 00:00 kernel-doc-0-2.4.22-1.218 100% |=========================| 26 kB 00:00 kernel-0-2.4.22-1.2188.np 100% |=========================| 42 kB 00:00 kernel-smp-0-2.4.22-1.218 100% |=========================| 43 kB 00:00 mc-1-4.6.0-14.10.i386.hdr 100% |=========================| 12 kB 00:00 kernel-0-2.4.22-1.2188.np 100% |=========================| 41 kB 00:00 Resolving dependencies .......Dependencies resolved I will do the following: [erase: switchdesk 3.9.8-18.i386] I will erase these to satisfy the dependencies: [deps: gdm 1:2.4.4.5-1.2.i386] [deps: libgnomeprintui22 2.4.0-1.i386] [deps: redhat-config-xfree86 0.9.15-1.noarch] [deps: libgal2 2:1.99.10-2.i386] [deps: nautilus-media 0.3.1-1.i386] [deps: XFree86-xdm 4.3.0-55.i386] [deps: k3b 0.11.9-0.fdr.1.1.i386] [deps: evolution 1.4.5-7.i386] [deps: libgnomeprintui 1.116.0-5.i386] [deps: XFree86-twm 4.3.0-55.i386] [deps: xinitrc 3.35-1.noarch] [deps: control-center 1:2.4.0-3.i386] [deps: XFree86 4.3.0-55.i386] [deps: kdebase 6:3.1.4-6.i386] [deps: gthumb 2.0.2-1.i386] [deps: openoffice.org 1.1.0-16.i386] [deps: mrproject 0.10-1.i386] [deps: gedit 1:2.4.0-3.i386] [deps: libgnomeprint 1.116.0-7.i386] [deps: nautilus 2.4.0-7.i386] [deps: XFree86-tools 4.3.0-55.i386] [deps: gtkhtml3 3.0.9-5.i386] [deps: gtksourceview 0.6.0-2.i386] [deps: gpdf 0.110-1.i386] [deps: libgnomeprint22 2.4.0-1.i386] [deps: eog 2.4.0-1.i386] [deps: gnome-session 2.4.0-3.i386] Is this ok [y/N]:
+( duncan brown : duncanbrown@linuxadvocate.net )+ +( linux "just works" : www.linuxadvocate.net )+
-------------------------------------------------- Understatement of the century: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones" - Linus Torvalds, August 1991 --------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 20:34 -0400, duncan brown wrote:
Mark McLoughlin said:
(Btw, if you do rpm --erase switchdesk, you should get the "old" GDM functionality for switching desktops)
you won't really have gdm at all.
I think he meant from fedora core 2 test 3, not from fedora core 1.
-sv
desktop@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org
-
Bill Nottingham -
duncan brown -
Florian La Roche -
Havoc Pennington -
Mark McLoughlin -
Matt Hansen -
Matthew Miller -
Owen Taylor -
Seth Nickell -
seth vidal -
Steven Mackay -
Stuart Children