GDM Look

[tactless]

GDM is my favorite display manager - it's fast, and the gdmflexiserver command is extremely useful. I do have a few gripes about it though - first of all, why should I have to choose between the purty graphical mode and the face chooser? There should be an option for faces in graphical mode. Also, it would be cool if it would display new mail for each displayed user, by checking /var/spool/mail. What do you guys think?
(Yeah, I really like WinXP's login screen...)
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Tactless

"If it wasn't for fog, the world would run at a really crappy framerate."

Jabber: tactless@amessage.info

[mglauche]

the problem u describe with gdm basicly boils down to too little time for developing the features everyone is waiting for someone else to step out and develop this feature

The email thing is a bit more complicated ... because there's not only /var/spool/mail for email. you would need to check this path, maildir, and possible imap (which should not be done, bc of security reasons)

[tactless]

Well, the default should be /var/spool/mail, and the user could be able to specify something else in a configuration file (much like faces). Checking maildirs for new mail shouldn't be hard, and you're right - IMAP shouldn't be checked.

When I have a serious vacation from school, I'll try and help out with this project.
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Tactless

"If it wasn't for fog, the world would run at a really crappy framerate."

Jabber: tactless@amessage.info

[cpwins]

I think there might be another problem with security. I think users should be able to create their own face by putting an image in their home-directories, for example ~/.gdm/face.png

Then GDM should search for these files in the users home-directories, open them, interpret them (usng libraries ofcourse), check size, resize if neccessary, display. But since these images are supplied by users instead of root, they could be virtually anything.

What if the user tries to use this image to hack/disrupt/abuse the system? The image could be a text file, a file over 100 MB in size, a link to /dev/zero, a file designed to create some kind of buffer overflow, a porn image, etc. The function that tries to read the image should be really careful, think of every possible exception and return an error when this happens. GDM can than not display the image instead.

This would be real tricky. Maybe we can also depend on root to supply the images, this would remove most of the security risks. But images created by users sounds more attractive. How does Windows XP handle this? (I don't have it myself.)
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