Timothy R. Butler wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>   I'd like to propose an idea that I think could easily be implemented by 9.1
> final and would be really great. I mean, wonderful.  Most of you probably
> know the term "Fast user switching" from the Windows XP marketingspeak. Most
> of you also know that GNU/Linux is fully capable of doing the same thing.
> 

This is something I have requested before, Mandrakesoft, please consider it!

Of course, we have had this much longer than XP, but the
point-and-clickers (the one's who would currently not be able to fix
their mouse with MCC if their mouse wasn't working) would think XP had
it first, because XP has a GUI for it.

>   The problem is, until recently, no one bothered to implement a GUI for this.
> Now Xandros has full fast user switching functionality -- there is a menu
> option that lets you login as another user (i.e. start another X session) or
> easily jump to another open session -- another tty). Red Hat, using gdm,
> offers the former functionality, but not the latter (you must still use
> Ctrl+Alt+F[num] combinations to switch).
> 

IMHO, kdm needs to implement this, and the two need to be compatible, so
if I am running gdm, but using KDE, the logout dialog still offers the
options I get if I'm running kdm.

>   Now, I'm not sure if Xandros' modifications are GPL'ed or not, but even if
> they weren't, I'd imagine that they would be very easy to reimplement on
> Mandrake. Since GNU/Linux already has the capability, it is a real shame not
> to exploit it, I think. If MDK implemented both pieces of the puzzle that I
> mention above, it would be the FIRST major distribution to do so, and would
> also be the FIRST Free Software-friendly distro to do so.
> 
>   With it being mostly implementing a simple gui to watch open X sessions and
> allow easy launching of additional X tty's seems to me something that would
> take very little effort but be nice to brag about on the 9.1 press release.

All we need is:
-"New login" support in kdm like gdm has, so that they are compatible
-A visible menu to "Change users", which lists current sessions, and has
an option for a new session
-Lock the current session (via screensaver) just before switching.

I haven't used the XP user switching GUI, so there might be better ways
of doing this.

-- 
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Buchan Milne                Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager
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