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Release Digest: GNOME, June 11, 2003

GDM 2.4.2.95

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKEIFOO

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

[note that a stable version 2.4.1.4 came out may 5th but I
didn’t announce it because I was lazy, but there was nothing new
there except translations, note the use of different parenthesis
for this note as opposed to the previous note, there is no special
reason for this though]

Now that I’m finished with school at least for the semester (You
may now call me … “Master George”), I have a lot more time for
working on various features of gdm. The feature freeze thing for
GNOME 2.4 does kind of put a damper on things, but that never
stopped me before … So let’s review what’s new:

First, the session setup is now complete
broken^H^H^H^H^H^Hreworked. This is from the discussions with
Oswald Buddenhagen, the KDM dude, so in the future at least part of
the session setup will be shared with KDM. The way this works is
that there is only ONE session script and many .desktop files for
various sessions (only two sessions shipped though:). Also on the
KDM-GDM unification front, face browser now reads ~/.face instead
of ~/.gnome2/photo, and the selection of language and session is
stored in the ~/.dmrc file. I have only done these changes
yesterday so it is likely that something is seriously broken. I
have logged in myself a few times testing this, but your mileage
(or kilometrage) may vary. Also the details of this are subject to
change if I feel particularly frisky at some point before actual
code freeze or whatnot.

In any case there’s lots of other fun stuff changed, such as the
PAM support is reworked to ask for the username itself, and many
other things which are likely to break your setup. Two things are
removed too, the LocalNoPasswordUsers is removed since it wasn’t
possible with the new PAM setup, and the GNOME session chooser is
gone since it wasn’t really working anyway, and all distros turned
it off I think.

Oh, and there is a theme writing document in the docs/ directory
of the tarball.

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 2.4.2.95:

  • Completely new session setup, born out of discussions with
    Oswald Buddenhagen, the KDM maintainer, which will bring about
    common session setup for both GDM and KDM. We now basically have a
    common /etc/X11/dm/Sessions directory where there are .desktop
    files are stored which describe sessions and these will be shared
    among KDM and GDM. Among other things this also makes the face
    browser default to using ~/.face and the per user saved info is in
    ~/.dmrc
  • The greeter.dtd is updated and there is theme creation
    documentation (Brian Cameron, Aidan Butler, me)
  • A face browser for the graphical greeter. This is selecting by
    selecting a theme that implements it. Add happygnome-list which
    does. (Patrizio Bruno, me)
  • The standard greeter has a GtkTreeView based face browser based
    on the new one from the graphical greeter.
  • Accesibility work. Add posibility of adding modules to the
    greeter through AddGtkModules and GtkModulesList. Add guesture
    listeners. Dwell mouse events. (Niall Power, Brian Cameron)
  • Attempt at getting things HIG-ified
  • Add “Run XDMCP chooser” button to the system menu, which is now
    called the “Actions” menu, also allow a server type that runs a
    chooser by adding a “chooser=true” to a server definition.
  • The XDMCP chooser got an overhaul internally. Also there is an
    “Add” button to add new hosts by typing in the hostname.
  • Add a PostLogin script which is run right after login succeeds
    but before any setup is done. This can be used if the users home
    directory needs to be setup here.
  • Add security/DisallowTCP which will append -nolisten tcp to all
    console displays, and this is by default true. Fixes #87291
  • PingInterval is now PingIntervalSeconds and is now in seconds,
    it makes no sense in minutes really since nobody is that patient
    anymore these days, also the comment in the config file said
    seconds, so I suppose this is a bugfix, should “fix” #103266
  • Add a “Delete theme” button to gdmsetup, add a scroll window to
    the theme preview, fixes #110302 and #104757
  • PAM now asks for username itself. This made
    LocalNoPasswordUsers impossible, and so that was removed. This way
    hopefully we should work with some more pam setups, such as
    smartcard ones. Fixes issues from #106537
  • The GNOME session chooser stuff is removed since it wasn’t
    working all right anyway and was kind of icky.
  • The F10 menu in the graphical greeter is nicer.
  • When you doubleclick on the radiobutton in graphical greeter
    Actions menu, it activates the item (Mihael Vrbanec)
  • There is the Welcome label and RemoteWelcome label now. The
    local Welcome label is now just “Welcome” since “Welcome to
    localhost” is silly. Also the graphical greeter uses this, as long
    as you use the stock label text.
  • Check for the capslock turned on before warning about it, and
    also only mention “bad username or password” if we actually asked
    for a password. Fixes #71496
  • The “subtype” field to the “show” item for the themes is gone,
    it was stupid and I hope no one used it (it wasn’t documented
    anyhow).
  • A bunch of standard pam messages are now translated inside
    gdm
  • If there are many sessions available the graphical greeter
    presents a scrolled window, fixes #104120
  • Don’t set RUSER for PAM and don’t set RHOST if this is a
    console login, apparently this is what it should be doing according
    to the Sun guys, fixes issues from #106537
  • The loop of death is now working as it should be and is not as
    sensitive. Also the toplevel loop of death does not abort the
    display, but only disables it for 2 minutes.
  • Suspend now works much better and doesn’t whack the gdm
    process, fixes #108700
  • When more then 50 users on the system don’t put them all into
    the combobox in gdmsetup, semi-fixes #111830
  • When using shadow passwords, fall back to standard if shadow is
    not available, fixes #109765 (cschelcher@free.fr)
  • Use strerror and not g_strerror as the latter returns UTF-8,
    fixes #106655
  • Set TEXTDOMAIN to GETTEXT_PACKAGE for the x keeps failing
    script, fixes #106657 (Owen Taylor)
  • gdmopens are done using login shell, fixes #106658, also
    gdmopen doesn’t deallocate the vt which is apparently not kosher
    and fixes #106656 (Owen Taylor, me)
  • Fix RedHat #91031, prepend a dash rather then make shell
    argv[0] a dash (Michael Blandford)
  • On Linux detect the runlevel and try to detect the user having
    run shutdown (from say gnome-session) and if so suspend the slave
    operation for 30 seconds and wait what happens. Most likely we’ll
    get whacked.
  • Fix typos and change some strings, #106207, #105923, #56654
    among others
  • gdmmktemp is gone as we have not been using it, also gdmaskpass
    and gdmopen are now in libexec
  • Many minor fixes
  • Build fixes (Brian Cameron, me)
  • Solaris fixes (Brian Cameron, Niall Power)
  • Translation updates, language additions and such (Danilo Aegan,
    Guntupalli Karunakar, Abel Cheung, me, Christian Rose, Christophe
    Merlet, Jordi Mallach, Christian Neumair, Miroslav Trmac, Pablo
    Gonzalo del Campo, Hasbullah Bin Pit, Vincent van Adrighem, Evandro
    Fernandes Giovanini, David Barzilay, Lucas ‘Basurero’ Vieites,
    Duarte Loreto, Kostas Papadimas, KAMAGASAKO Masatoshi, Dmitry G.
    Mastrukov)

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:

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 suppose most people are completely uninterested in my
fish, which is why I keep writing about them in the PS of gdm
announcements. Though obviously, since there hasn’t been many
announcements lately, you have not heard about my fish for a while.
And that’s why I’m not going to tell you anything about my fish
this time. Actually since I gotta go finish working on a bookshelf,
I’m not going to tell you anything silly: HAH! No silliness from me
this time. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!! (imagine being sprayed with with
tiny drops of saliva when you are reading the PFFFT, since that’s
what should happen on the receiving end)


George <jirka@5z.com>

A good memory is needed after one has lied.

  • Pierre Corneille

gucharmap 0.8.0

Application

gucharmap 0.8.0

Description

gucharmap is a Unicode character map using GTK+ 2.2 or
later.

Enhancements

  • full character details are now in a textview in separate
    tab
  • as a result of this, much of the View menu evaporates
  • characters mentioned in the details tabs are clickable links;
    back and forward history for clicked-characters
  • useful character information is shown in the status bar; this
    includes at a minimum the codepoint and character name; for CJK
    ideographs, the definition; usage notes if the character has
    any
  • got rid of the U+xxxx page listings in the left pane, since
    they weren’t very useful
  • search and jump-to-codepoint dialogs are a bit nicer, work
    better
  • got rid of Zoom Mode menu item; keyboard users can hold down
    Shift instead
  • install “gnome-character-map” symlink to gucharmap (requested
    by the gcharmap maintainer)
  • change “Char_map” menu to “_File”
  • it says in the magnification window which font is actually
    being used to draw the character
  • function names in the public API changed to start with
    “gucharmap_” prefix
  • header files start with “gucharmap”; only need to #include
    <gucharmap/gucharmap.h>

Fixes

  • ./configure option not to generate gtk.immodules (mainly useful
    for distro package maintainers)
  • accessibility fix: emit active-descendant-changed signal when
    selected cell changes (bug #112981, Padraig O’Briain)
  • ignore keypresses with modifiers in the character table

Home Page

http://gucharmap.sourceforge.net/

Download

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gucharmap/

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gucharmap


multi-backgrounds-daemon 0.1.1

Application

multi-backgrounds-daemon 0.1.1

Description

A daemon for Gnome 2 that change your backgound when you switch
to other workspace

Fixes

2003-06-06 Fix workspace name / gconf bug

Download

http://jk24.free.fr/multi-backgrounds-daemon/

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/mbd


GtkSourceView 0.3.0

Application

GtkSourceView 0.3.0

Description

It’s a text widget that extends the standard Gtk+ 2.x
GtkTextView. It improves it by implementing syntax highlighting and
other features typical of a source editor.

It’s currently being used by gedit, Glimmer source code editor
and other projects like DiaSCE2 and Mono Debugger.

Two new (big) features in this release: printing (with
highlighting) support and API reference documentation building. The
docs are still very incomplete (around 35% coverage) but the plan
is to finish them during the incoming API freeze.

Thanks to Jeroen Zwartepoorte we now have case insensitive
search support integrated, with a GtkTextIter-like API.

Also, 6 new translations have been added. Thanks a lot to the
translators for their work.

On the same subject, language spec files now have user visible
strings (name and section primarily) translatable. For example,
gedit has a menu with all highlighting styles available,
categorized by section. If you’re creating a .lang file outside of
GtkSourceView you need to provide the translation domain as an
attribute (translation-domain) in the “language” node of the XML
file. And you need to use CVS HEAD intltool to extract marked
strings.

Requirements

  • GLib and GTK+ 2.2.0 or later
  • LibXML2 2.5.0 or later
  • libgnomeprint 2.2.0 or later

News since last release

  • Added missing ‘GenericName’ keyword in desktop.lang (bug
    #113467) [Gustavo Giráldez]
  • Fix regex pattern for character constants in C/C++/Ada (bug
    #113498) [Michael Terry]
  • API reference documentation building infrastructure
    [Gustavo]
  • Added support for translation of user visible strings in
    language spec files [Gustavo]
  • Documented GtkSourceBuffer [Gustavo]
  • Case insensitive search functions (documented 😉 [Jeroen
    Zwartepoorte]
  • Added missing GtkSourceLanguage macro (pointed by Jeff Franks)
    [Gustavo]
  • Fix typo in gtksourcelanguagesmanager.c (bug #113278) [Alex
    Duggan]
  • Printing support [Gustavo]
  • Some minor bugfixes and internal API changes, such as taking
    const GtkTextIters in places where they are not supposed to change
    [Gustavo]
  • Treat compiler warnings as errors by default [Gustavo]
  • gtk_sourcebuffer_findbracket_match has
    been renamed to gtk_sourceiter_findmatching_bracket [Paolo Maggi]
  • Defined a minimal list of required styles for a style scheme to
    implement [Paolo]
  • Fix translatable string (bug #114404) [Gustavo]

New and updated translations

  • Czech (new) [Miloslav Trmac]
  • Portuguese (new) [Duarte Loreto]
  • Russian (new) [Dmitry G. Mastrukov]
  • Spanish (new) [Francisco Javier Fernandez]
  • German (new) [Christian Neumair]
  • Traditional Chinese (new) [Abel Cheung]
  • Swedish [Christian Rose]

Download


http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtksourceview/0.3/gtksourceview-0.3.0.tar.gz

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