gdm early login

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

Recently Matthias Clasen, David Zeuthen, and I spent some time working
on getting GDM to start earlier in the boot process.  There are a few
advantages to this:

- If we start GDM sooner, we don't have to start rhgb. starting 2 X
servers at boot up doesn't play nice with some hardware and rhgb doesn't
really offer much anyway.

- If we start GDM sooner, the user can type in his or her username and
password sooner (as long as we don't actually process the information
until the system is in a usable state).

- If we start GDM sooner, the system will "feel" faster because the user
will see a login screen sooner.

- If we allow the user to login as soon as the essential services are
started but before the unessential services are started then the user
can potentially get up, running and doing work sooner. 

We still need to make some changes in lower-levels of the distro before
gdm early-login mode will work. See here for details:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=151952

On the other hand, some people have noticed changes appearing in gdm and
have become curious what it is, so I thought I'd post a message here
with instructions on how to try it.  Note it's not very well tested yet,
so it could mess up your system.

The first step is to install the latest gdm from rawhide.

Once you've done that, then install this initscripts rpm:

http://people.redhat.com/rstrode/initscripts-8.07-1.0.earlylogin.src.rpm

Next thing you'll want to do is to change the chkconfig: line
in /etc/init.d/xfs to 
# chkconfig: 2345 08 97

and also change the chkconfig: line in /etc/init.d/syslog to 
# chkconfig: 2345 07 98

then run 
/sbin/chkconfig xfs on
/sbin/chkconfig syslog on
/sbin/chkconfig --add gdm-early-login
/sbin/chkconfig --add gdm-allow-login
/sbin/chkconfig gdm-early-login on
/sbin/chkconfig gdm-allow-login on
to regenerate the symlinks in /etc/rc5.d

The last thing that needs to be changed is grub.conf.  It should be
modified such that the kernel cmdline has "early-login" in it.

For instance, it might look like this:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1208_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 quiet
vga=0x317 early-login

It's all probably pretty fragile right now, so be careful.

--Ray Strode