About early gdm logon

[Chris Ricker]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2005, Ray Strode wrote:

> Hi,
> > Just noticed that the new gdm in rawhide allows early logon before the
> > entire system is up. But as I read about it in the init script does not
> > actually allow users to logon until the entire system is up. My question
> > is what is the purpose of this if you can't logon when the screen
> > appears?
> There are a number of advantages to starting gdm early.
> 
> 1) no rhgb means we don't have to start two X servers during the boot
> up process.  This means faster bootup, less badness on bad hardware,
> etc...
> 
> 2) The user can potentially login sooner if we only limit login until
> the services that the user absolutely needs are started.
> 
> 3) The system feels like it boots faster if the user sees a login screen
> early.
> 
> 4) The user can type their username and password as soon as a login
> screen appears, then walk away--get coffee whatever--and come back with
> it all logged in.
> 
> Note, even if we say "the services that the user absolutely needs" in 2)
> above is "all services that we're going to start", it still has the
> other mentioned advantages.
> 
> We still need to make some changes in lower-levels of the distro before
> dm early-login mode will work.  You can track progress here if you're
> interested:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=151952

FWIW, Sun made a similar change for Solaris 10. It may be worth looking at 
what was done there just for comparison. (though preferably without 
drinking the XML kool-aid! :-)

later,
chris