gdm changes and the live cd

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 18:25 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> There are some changes in GDM and GNOME3 that affect our live cd setup,
> and will require some changes:
> 
> GDM no longer has a keyboard or language chooser. They were mainly added
> to cater to livecd must-choose-before login scenarios, but they proved
> to be really problematic ever since we added them, since they cause a
> conflict between multiple configuration sources (system keyboard layout
> vs stored user configuration vs login screen choice, etc). Without these
> choosers, it doesn't really make sense anymore to stop at the login
> screen with a time login, and we should consider to just autologin
> directly to the user session. The session will start in English, and
> users who need a different language will have to select the language in
> System Settings > Region and re-login. Keyboard configuration is less
> problematic, since it can be changed without requiring a re-login.

This seems pretty reasonable and is actually what all the other desktops
do already. As a wishlist item, it may be nice to have an applet for
language / keyboard layout switching in the default configuration (as,
ew, international editions of Windows do).

> We no longer show icons on the desktop, so there is no immediately
> obvious place to show the 'install to hard disk' launcher. The
> alternatives are to make it a favourite in the shell overview, or to add
> it as a menuitem in the user menu. Both of these have some drawbacks
> (the favourite does not display any text, leaving the user to guess from
> the icon, the user menu requires a gnome-shell patch). An alternative
> I'd like to propose is to simply autostart the installer. That will make
> it hard to overlook, and seems to nicely emphasize the main role of the
> live cd as a convenient way to install Fedora.

As you didn't like the idea of displaying a Nautilus window with the
Desktop folder contents by default, that may be the best other choice
for me, though I do worry about people feeling 'compelled' to install
with that setup. It does seem like a decent option, though.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net