xfdm

[Anders F Björklund]

Ori Bernstein wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:49:14 +0200, polytan <polytan at gmail.com> said:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm using xfce for a quite long time (I agree, less than M. Fourdan 
>> :) ) and
>> I try to only use xfce components (understand gtk only and no gnome).
>>
>> So, I'm asking all people developping xfce software because an xfce 
>> daemon
>> manager is the last thing not currently existing.
>
> This has been discussed repeatedly.
>
> Creating a DM (Desktop Manager) is far from trivial when the security 
> issues are
> taken into account, and nobody seems to be interested in creating and
> maintaining it.
>
> Unless you're willing to write a DM for Xfce, just use GDM or Slim or 
> XDM or one
> of the many other login managers.

Easier than writing a Display Manager (not daemon manager nor desktop 
manager)
from scratch is to use GDM but only use the GTK+ version of the login 
screen,
and then port the GUI control interface to the config files over from 
GNOME ?

See e.g. 
http://foo-projects.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2005-April/015412.html

This makes for a nicer interface which is consistent with the rest of 
Xfce
(since it uses standard GTK+ like the rest of Xfce) - and avoids having 
to
rewrite all the lower-level layers with all the security implications 
etc.

For Fedora, the login screen would look something like:
http://www.algonet.se/~afb/xfce/gdmlite-fedora-login.png

I used a special stripped-down local RPM package called "GDM Lite", but 
this
could be formalized into a "real" Xfce-targetted variant of GDM 
perhaps... ?
(the -lite package just omits a couple of binaries to cut dependencies 
down)

# Customize: /etc/gdm/custom.conf [daemon]
Greeter=/usr/libexec/gdmlogin
# Customize: etc/gdm/custom.conf [greeter]
Logo=/usr/share/icons/Fedora/96x96/places/start-here.png

But it does need a real GUI for Xfce, so one doesn't have to edit 
configs.
Why not start with http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/screenshots.html 
and
port the backend over to use Xfce configurations instead of the GNOME 
ones ?

--anders

PS. GDM-Lite was inspired by http://vljubovic.members.epn.ba/ubuntu.html