xguest in the live cd

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 09:59 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 22:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > My goal was to get the desktop live cd experience to match the Fedora
> > DVD experience as closely as possible. Now, you will get xguest by
> > default only if you install from the live cd. I think such deviations
> > should be avoided. Speaking from the documentation perspective, these
> > things are very much a pain.
> > 
> 
> In this case, we're using the Beta as an experiment, not as a final
> setting.  Where to put the package in comps is a real problem when you
> consider interaction with other DEs and WMs and LMs, particularly at
> this stage of the freeze.  If things go well with xguest being on the
> Live image we can then discuss how to appropriately place it in comps
> after beta.

Indeed, just an experiment. 

After playing a bit with it, I am pretty convinced that we don't want
xguest by default in F11. We are just fooling ourselves if we think that
having "Guest" appear on the gdm login screen means that we have a
working guest account. The current xguest package is more like a
technology demo that shows that selinux does indeed make it possible to
tightly lock down a lot of desktop features without adjusting the UI at
all. 

If we want to have a meaningful guest account we will have to do the
same hard work that the Ubuntu guys did of defining the use cases,
figuring out what the guest is supposed to do, and adjust the guest
session to actually reflect these abilities. 

Here are some things I noticed in 10 minutes of using a xguest session:

- When logging into the xguest account, I get a regular default gnome
desktop, with the difference that a lot of things don't work (except for
firefox). 

- For some reason, gnome-power-manager is not running in the xguest
session.

- I tried to open a web page with epiphany, and it didn't work, while
doing it in firefox works just fine. But still, epiphany is in the
menus. 

- I inserted a usb stick, and got some nautilus dialogs, but unlocking
the encrypted partition didn't work, probably because /media was not
visible.

- None of the PolicyKit policies have been adapted to reflect that
xguest will not be able to do much of anything.

On top of this, xguest seems to have some serious issues, see e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=491924


Matthias