make ~/.face world-readable (low-hanging-fruit) (Was Re: livecd hacking)

[Jonathan Blandford]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 13:41 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote: 
> Jonathan Blandford (jrb at redhat.com) said: 
> > I think what David is getting at is that we would like to have only one
> > install experience for the user.  Right now, we have two install
> > experiences -- the first when you run anaconda, the second when you hit
> > firstboot.  In the managed desktop case (enterprise workstations) the
> > install is split between the admin who does the install on the machine
> > and the enduser does the 'install' by setting up accounts/timezones.
> > David is proposing to merge those for the desktop spin.
> > 
> > It's a bit aspirational, and there's a lot that should be cleaned up in
> > firstboot first.  But I think it's a good experience, too.
> 
> What confuses me is that I'm not sure firstboot makes sense for any
> sort of 'managed' desktop - surely things like authentication, timezone,
> and users (on the network) have already been set up by that point? Firstboot
> seems more targeted for the 'home user' (ugh) who is getting a preinstalled
> box from some OEM.

It depends a bit on the enterprise doing the managing.  Some of them do
set timezones/users in advance, but most don't bother.  Enough let the
end user do it that I stand by my generalization. (-:  Additionally, a
non-trivial number of people add their own firstboot modules to the mix
to set up site-specific stuff.

> What may make sense (and also be completely unimplementable) is to structure
> things so that steps can be moved between firstboot and anaconda at will
> based on some sort of configuration.

Yeah, though that's led to some of the awkward sharing of code and a few
poor design.  One thing we proposed doing is actually moving firstboot
to be part of GDM, and letting things like the timezone and user
accounts be modifiable from there.

Thanks,
-Jonathan