terminal services prototype

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hey,

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 14:52, James Laska wrote:
> Nice work!
> 
> I've been looking for something like this ever since I came across
> `screen`.  A few quick questions:
> 
> - How should physical console logins and logins over VNC for the same
> user at the same time be handled?  Should both be accessing the same VNC
> session?  I notice that if I login on VNC, and attempt to login on the
> physical console...the session is not shared.

	Okay, what I was thinking was that if you first log in on console and
then log in using VNC, you'll get connected to the console login
(requires work in Vino we haven't even looked at yet). But if you log in
from console, you'll never get re-directed to an existing session - it
will always start a new one.

>   This results in
> gnome-session and gconf getting confused.  One session seems to get the
> *locks* for gnome-settings-daemon and uses the configured theme?  While
> the other session defaults to the stock GNOME icon set and theme.  I
> believe this is already a known issue with running multiple
> gnome-sessions at the same time.

	Right, we need a gnome-settings-daemon for each display:

	http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94049

	Jody doesn't think the patch I had is viable for reasons I never really
understood. And I've not yet succeeded in getting Jonathan interested in
the problem. Jonathan ? :-)

	Sun have all these same problems with Sun Ray and up 'til now they were
the only ones who cared about them. They're our problem too, now. Fun,
huh ? :-)

> - The VNC session will not be able to do hardware acceleration?
> 
> - Launching desktop screensaver preferences shows:
> 
> xscreensaver-demo is running as "root" on "myserver".  But the
> xscreensaver managing display ":1.0" is running as user "nobody" on host
> "myserver".  Since they are different users they won't be
> reading/writing the same ~/.xscreensaver file, so xscreensaver-demo
> isn't going to work right.

	Hmm, nice. No ideas off the top of my head on that one.

> - The window title for the VNC session is: "VNC: x11".  Probably want
> something more descriptive like the user name, or the host?

	Yeah, probably. But mostly I expect the viewer to be running
fullscreen.

> - Perhaps a way to list *active* VNC sessions?  The modified gdm doesn't
> appear to add entries to utmp/wtmp.  Once you login, perhaps you are
> prompted with a dialog like:
> 
> "There is already an active desktop running for $USER from $HOST.  Would
> you like to create a new desktop, or join one from the list below?"

	Yes, figuring out something like that is on our immediate TODO list.
Not sure exactly what it'll be like yet.

> - Should the gdm xdmcp configuration settings hold true for the remote
> VNC gdm mode also?  Meaning, if you set the gdm theme to be the
> "old-style" greeter for remote consoles...

	Yeah, for no good reason at all we made the graphical greeter the
default for the VNC login. Well, for one good reason - the standard
greeter sucks.

	We also need to add the VNC configuration to gdmsetup. Lots to do :-)

Cheers,
Mark.