Release Digest: GNOME, July 24, 2003

GDM 2.4.2.98

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGJMP

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

[For a stable version use version 2.4.1.4]

I actually wrote up some docs for this thing. Isn’t that crazy.
In any case I’ve updated the reference docs, added lots of new info
and merged in the greeter theme document. So the
GdmGreeterThemeManual.txt is gone now. The docs are standard gnome
docbook/xml docs and are installed so that you can browse them
through the GNOME help system under GNOME|System. They are also now
on the web in both html and pdf format at the webpage (www.jirka.org/gdm.html)

Also of interest is that there are now two uses of
setjmp/longjmp in the code and more are likely coming in the
future. I’ve finally overcome my irrational fear of setjmp/longjmp
and started using them. Some of the problems really weren’t
possible to solve without them with some weird fork hack. So now I
can’t mention any more that GDM is better then XDM because it
doesn’t use longjmp 🙂

More security kind of things were added in this release, for
example we’re now also very careful in the logdir, and the
authority files are not readable by the gdm user after the session
has started until the session ends. Also the on-disk-fifo is no
longer used for slave<->daemon communication meaning the gdm
user can cause less havoc with that as well.

Also lots of speed improvements. First of all the FIFO change
makes things a bit snappier and there was also an overhaul of how
many XOpenDisplay’s we do which turns out took up a lot of time.
The most significant improvment comes from fixing the server
reinitialization which shaves off a few seconds from server reinit
(and avoids some races as well).

There is even a new feature (which passed the release-team and I
even didn’t have to whine much) which makes it possible to have
custom selectors on the graphical greeter. Look for the “listitem”
tag in the theme documentation.

To solve the libart crash issue, I now require a new version of
libart with that fixed (there’s one more fix in the same code in
CVS but I haven’t seen that affect gdm).

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 2.4.2.98:

DOCUMENTATION! We have documentation! I’ve updated the xml docs
and they’re installed so you can use the GNOME help browser to
browse them under GNOME|System. Or you can view the HTML versions
on the webpage (www.jirka.org/gdm.html)
Whack the GdmGreeterThemeManual.txt as it is now part of the
xml documentation
Add mnemonics/keynav to a bunch of things and generally try to
fix issues from the HIG bugs filed in bugzilla (partially fixes
#117776, #117784, #117504
Add “listitem” tag to the graphical themes. This allows custom
list widgets in the theme and then you can get the info in a
PreSession script or whatnot.
The graphical greeter now scales down fonts on screens 800×600
and less, and scalles down fonts even more on screens 640×480 and
less.
Remove the iconification of Standard greeter feature, it was
broken and I didn’t want to fix it, and it was weird anyway.
Internal messaging is now faster as we use an internal pipe
instead of the FIFO file. Also reduces the damage gdm user can
do
Don’t XOpenDisplay so many times to make things run along a lot
faster, and use XSetAuthority instead of XAUTHORITY env var
internaly
The server reinit is now safer, doesn’t fork an extra process
and it’s quite a bit faster
Justification of text in the graphical greeter is based on the
anchor of the text
We’re very careful about the log directory as well as the
ServAuthDir
Fix a bunch of errors (mostly portability stuff) by looking at
the FreeBSD cvs repository
The server authfile is now unreadable by the gdm user during a
user sessions for security
Fixed #109331, by catching term/int/hup signals properly when
inside the hanging gethostbyaddr/name
The name resolution stuff now caches the last result for 60
seconds
Get the name of the root user instead of assuming it’s “root”
(fixes #117527)
Fix hangs with the signal stuff by fixing the in_signal flag
undercounts and redoing the waitpid mess in the slave by using a
select call, and not doing that many things in the signal handlers.
Also fixes a long delay when restarting the greeter
Fix configuration with –with-xinerama=no (#117895)
The standard greeter clock will now look much better with some
themes.
An empty return will once again log you into the timed user as
it did before I broke it
The Xsession now displays $0 in output (Steve Chaplin,
#117898)
There is now a gdmtranslate libexec proggie that does what the
gettext command does, so we get translations from scripts even on
user systems (ones without developer kind of packages)
Fix gdmaskpass internationalization
Lots of random minor fixes
Translation updates (Artur Flinta, Vincent van Adrighem, Duarte
Loreto, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo, Francisco Javier Fernandez,
Hasbullah Bin Pit, Noor Azurah Anuar, Christian Neumair, Miloslav
Trmac, Danilo Segan, Serbian team, Kang Jeong-Hee)

Note: GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen
<[email protected]>, 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 may or may not work (it should, and it did some time ago but I
haven’t tried it lately).

Have fun,

George

PS: I am planning to apply for a copyright on stupidity to which
I have aquired license rights to when I bought Idiocy, Inc. I have
revoked SCO’s license to use and/or sell stupidity and am herby
requiring they destroy all copies of said stupidity. Furthermore I
will be announcing a plan to license run-only license of stupidity
for current users for the low price of $10,000 per brain. This
license is only for using your current stupidity and does not allow
you to modify or even analize your stupidity as you would be
infringing on my IP rights. I am now asking for 1 gazillion dollars
of damages from SCO for lost revenue since stupidity is the primary
mode of human activity ranging from SOHO use to large enterprise
usage. Stupidity is used to run 98% of the world’s corporations,
which tops UNIX server usage by quite a bit.

—
George <[email protected]>

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

Goethe

gnome-panel 2.3.4.1

Hey,

What is it ?

gnome-panel contains the GNOME panel which is the area on your
desktop from which you can run applications and applets, and
perform other tasks.

What’s changed ?

gnome-panel 2.3.4.1

Panel
- Yet more excellant HIG work (Dennis Cranston)
- Fix typo between panel menu GConf keys (Mohamed El Ayouty)
- Fix crashing when cancelling the run dialog (Arvind)
- Make mnemonics in the Actions and Add to Panel menus invisible
  (Glynn, Mark)
- Fix positioning of the menu bar context menu (Glynn, Mark)
- Remove the KDE menu – should be done with vfolders now
  (George)
- Remove autohiding into the corner (Mark)
- Implement a properties dialog for drawers (Mark)
- Fix launchers and action buttons on vertical panels (Mark)
- Fix rectangular button widget on vertical panels (Mark)
- Fix issue with drawers being destroyed when creating a new
  panel (Mark)
- Fix drag and drop of launchers to drawers (Mark)
- Fix issue where drawer panel obscures drawer button when hidden
  (Mark)
- Fix warnings about “panel-stock-arrow-*” not found (Mark)
- Remove unnecessary dependancy on ORBit2 HEAD (Mark)
Misc
- Install icons into $(datadir)/pixmaps instead of
  $(datadir)/icons (Glynn)
Translators
- Changwoo Ryu (ko)
- Christian Neumair (de)
- Christian Rose (sv)
- Dafydd Harries (cy)
- Duarte Loreto (pt)
- Gil ‘Dolfin’ Osher (he)
- Gnome PL Team (pl)
- Kjartan Maraas (no)
- Mehmet TARIMCI (tr)
- Miloslav Trmac (cs)
- Pablo G. del Campo (es)
- Reinout van Schouwen (nl)