gdm version in Fedora 9

[Nicu Buculei]

As I understand, the GNOME release team has decided to ship gdm version 
2.20 in GNOME 2.22 due to a number of regression but the plan for Fedora 
  is still to have gdm 2.22 in F9, is this correct?

I ask this from the perspective of the Art Team, we approach a deadline 
(in about a week) when the desktop theme is supposed to be complete so 
is important for us to know *how* gdm will be themed.
My understanding is that theming in the new gdm is much simpler (just a 
background image and the rest is done from Gtk+), could someone provide 
additional info?

[1] - 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2008-February/msg00059.html

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Nicu Buculei  wrote:
> As I understand, the GNOME release team has decided to ship gdm version
>  2.20 in GNOME 2.22 due to a number of regression but the plan for Fedora
>   is still to have gdm 2.22 in F9, is this correct?

Yes, that is the plan.  Time was running short in the GNOME 2.22
schedule.  However, we have a bit more time in the F9 schedule so we
can solve the major regressions.
> I ask this from the perspective of the Art Team, we approach a deadline
>  (in about a week) when the desktop theme is supposed to be complete so
>  is important for us to know *how* gdm will be themed.
>  My understanding is that theming in the new gdm is much simpler (just a
>  background image and the rest is done from Gtk+), could someone provide
>  additional info?

Right.  We run a gnome-settings-daemon in the greeter so that we pick
up the system gconf defaults for background, icon theme, metacity
theme, gtk theme, etc.  So, whatever work you do to get the desktop
themes tweaked will be inherited by the GDM greeter.

One advantage of this is that the transition from greeter to a default
session is pretty smooth.  The background doesn't change, the
icons/colors/etc don't change, and the gnome-panel slides into view.

If for some reason we want to customize the greeter we can still do
that.  One way is to do something similar to what we did for the
gnome-screensaver dialog.  We can modify the glade file and provide a
gtkrc.

One extra bit of theming/branding that I added upstream (not in
rawhide yet) is the ability to specify a logo icon name to use in
place of the computer monitor image on the greeter login dialog.  We
could add the the Fedora logo there for example.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Jon

[Nicu Buculei]

William Jon McCann wrote:
> Right.  We run a gnome-settings-daemon in the greeter so that we pick
> up the system gconf defaults for background, icon theme, metacity
> theme, gtk theme, etc.  So, whatever work you do to get the desktop
> themes tweaked will be inherited by the GDM greeter.

So if will work also with animated backgrounds? That is cool.
> One advantage of this is that the transition from greeter to a default
> session is pretty smooth.  The background doesn't change, the
> icons/colors/etc don't change, and the gnome-panel slides into view.

Yes, I like very much this idea.
> If for some reason we want to customize the greeter we can still do
> that.  One way is to do something similar to what we did for the
> gnome-screensaver dialog.  We can modify the glade file and provide a
> gtkrc.

As GDM is a moving target for the moment, I think it make sense to stay 
with the default in F9 (it will be enough a novelty anyway and Fedora 
the only distro with the feature) and we can evaluate in future releases 
is we want/need to further customize the greeter.
> One extra bit of theming/branding that I added upstream (not in
> rawhide yet) is the ability to specify a logo icon name to use in
> place of the computer monitor image on the greeter login dialog.  We
> could add the the Fedora logo there for example.

We were de-branding the desktop graphics all over the place in F8 (to 
support customization) so maybe we would want to stay with the default, 
at least for F9.
> What do you think?

Thank you, that was very informative. It seems we can just remove the 
gdm from the Art's ToDo for F9, this is fine, less work for us :p

I will forward the info to the Art list.

[Bill Nottingham]

Nicu Buculei ([e-mail]) said:
> We were de-branding the desktop graphics all over the place in F8 (to 
> support customization) so maybe we would want to stay with the default, at 
> least for F9.

Well, as long as it references a 'generic' path (i.e., not something
that says 'fedora-logo'), we can easily fudge whatever.

Bill