Making the Live CD slicker

[Jonathan Blandford]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 10:12 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:


> > - The initial gdm screen is a bit of a hack.  The message that you can
> > click on the Fedora feels ugly.  If we must have the GDM screen for
> > keyboard or language, we might want to go through firstboot or
> > something.
> 
> Euw, gods no. Please. I don't want to click many times on a task driven
> interface just to get started whenever I boot the live CD. Perhaps if
> you could qualify a bit more why the gdm screen "is a bit of a hack" it
> would be useful. 

Surely we can get it to once per task, no?  Anyway, the current gdm
screen does feel like a hack to me.  I think it's the "click on the
fedora icon to log in" aspect.  It would be nice to see a screen that's
dedicated to the Live CD here.

> Either way, gdm _needs_ this functionality (think shared computer with
> users having varying language preferences); punting this to Fedora
> specific tools is in my view a much greater hack. This is the old
> mantra: do the work upstream etc. etc.

My fault.  I was jumping ahead in my head to the brave new world of gdm
where firstboot and gdm are integrated, and language/accessibility are
part of the environment.  I'm basically proposing an extra mode to GDM
just for that.

> Another reason for gdm is if you ship a live image with both GNOME and
> KDE. Then you'd have several faces to click on.

Hrm.  Is that enough in the cards that we should design for it?

> > - While signing up for a wireless network, it gnome-keyring prompts me
> > for a keyring password.
> 
> This is a good point, maybe the live cd initscript should set a blank
> password for the fedora users keyring. Even better, perhaps the
> gnome-keyring bits can detect a blank password (probably harder since it
> would require to init the pam stack and check the conversation is
> empty).

Yeah.  You're bound to trigger that dialog one way or another during the
session.

> > - nautilus shows the Live CD on the desktop, and lets you try to
> > eject/unmount it.
> 
> By design. The idea is that the Live CD itself can contain promo /
> information / foreign apps that is also visible when mounting it on
> foreign OS's (Windows, Macs). We just haven't used this feature (we
> should).

Can't we just have the promo appear as part of the image?  Also, isn't
the user name on the f-u-s applet 'Fedora Live'?  As implemented right
now, the CD is strange.

> Further, having the icon is a good indicator for people they're running
> a live OS. Maybe the eject/unmount should be greyed out; then again, you
> can't actually unmount/eject it; you are given an error message if you
> try.

I would vote to make it insensitive at a minimum.

> Yes. Anaconda pulls in a lot of the system-config-* tools that are not
> very useful neither on the live cd nor on the installed system. There's
> also like three SELinux icons or something in the menus. All of them
> really needs to go on the desktop live cd.

Agree, though I think you mean go _from_ the live CD. (-;

Thanks,
-Jonathan