Okay earlygdm re-tooled for a desktop spin
Based on some urging from the community I decided to re-tool what I
had and release a version of patches to it that could use the existing
rhgb without any patches. You can download the svn diff here
http://www.hekanetworks.com/~jnettlet/open-source/fedora/earlygdm.diff
Before you just going and applying this patch to your system here are
the working internals
*!!!!* I have patched start_udev so it can be run in two separate
pieces. So I had the necessary pieces to start X without waiting 7
seconds staring at starting udev *yawn* this was necessary. There is
no reason we can't dupe start_udev into two individual files that
doesn't touch the original file. I am open to doing that.
I don't have init level checking in my code yet. It is simple to do I
just haven't done it yet.
I have gdm reading from a custom earlygdm.conf file so you can mess
with that without changing your systems default behavior.
One other patch just moves the acpi module installation to
/etc/sysconfig/modules . Working the rc.sysinit I just kept seeing
that there and had no idea why were weren't using the mechanism 10
lines above it.
Right now this works seamlessly on my nvidia box, but my openchrome
laptop is killing off the x-server before the gdm greeter has run. My
guess is my laptop is slow enough that it is hitting one of gdm's
timeout values and the slave is getting reset.
Currently the manual fscking and such is not interactive because rhgb
needs another fifo to send input back from it's vte to another
program. I started writing this and then decided to wait until I
found out what other people think. I am also toying with allowing
rhgb to do gtk.embedding, or possibly create an overlay like gdm uses
to run it's setup program, so the apps run in rc.sysinit if it is
unconfigured can run their Xorg counterparts. I am also tempted to
play around with Zenity to see what else we can do to remove the need
for a terminal and give more intuitive dialogs easily.
Jon