On 20 Aug 2002, SI Reasoning wrote: > I know it already exists in Linux. What I liked about XP was how it was > implemented. GDM allows you to pre-open several X sessions at once, > regardless of whether they are used. You would also have to know the > keystrokes to get to each x session and any session that did not have a > quick screensaver with password enabled could be accessed by anyone else > once logged into. > > What I was bringing up was the idea of making it simple and intuitive, > with listings on the unified menu of who is logged into each X session > and the ability to click on that name to switch to that x-session (with > the proper password). Also make starting up new X-sessions on demand and > the ability to kill any extra X-sessions when a user logs out.
I completely agree with you. The important thing here is that with XP it is so easy to find and understand that everybody know how to use it at first try. Whereas, no one ever thinks about going into Start -> Boot and Init -> New login with GDM, and even those who find it by chance cannot ever guess what it means. This is a typical situation where Linux has more features, but it inaccessible to most people, and more complicated to use, even for simple situations. This is a job for Mandrake to make it easy with Linux, too, at least in common situations. Perhaps Mandrake should design a small "switch X user" application (needs some root privilege) which would appear in the first level of the Mandrake menu (which is windowmanager-independent, thanks for this very important feature -- where does it come from originally ? ;). It would offer two explicit choices -"log in as a different user without interrupting current session" -"switch back to an already logged session" and a list of user icons have an "advanced" tab that trigger displaying screen depths with icons -select screen depth: [*]default []8bpp []16bpp []24bpp []32bpp and perhaps (in a future version) -freeze current user apps [yes/no] (why ? because some apps might be running, take resources for nothing, which prevents them from being simply swapped out. What about remote apps, well the X protocol is known to do a lot of things, it must already implement some kind of xon/xoff-like feature "i'm asleep for a while") This would: -as the user running the current session, lock the screen with the screensaver the user is currently using (ask the X server about the presence of a client, NOT the local process table because the screensaver client might be remote, or do things like "xscreensaver-command -lock" which does the right thing), or launch a simple one if there is no one running -as root, launch a new X server, that queries GDM/KDM/whatever; which does the rest of the job in case of a new session -OR in case we switch back to an existing session, locate the correct virtual terminal and perform a "chvt" (or directly the correct ioctl). (and perhaps wake up the X server that might have gone to sleep or even switch of the monitor) There are some issues in special cases (pure X terminal with remote *dm, etc...) and GDM/KDM has to be properly configured to accept new connections. Perhaps this is actually all a job for the display manager, not for a new, standalone app. Also, I agree with answer by MandrakeSoft people that it might be better to have all this handled by one single X server, not launching several ones (too bad for the different screen depths). Conclusion: If the existing but beginner-unusable feature is invisible, and no one puts it forward, this will never change. If you popularize this feature, things will change. The basic argument is: Unix and Linux are multi-user systems. A complete multi-user environment should make easy for people to share a common console without reading the Console-Howto. (Also, same thing for changing screen depth...) There are some other small issues but this mail is too long already. -- St�phane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab http://animatlab.lip6.fr/ - philo du dimanche http://amphi-gouri.org/
