On Wednesday 10 March 2004 17:22, Ron Johnson wrote: <SNIP> > > Firstly, my mother's PC - she is the only person who ever used it, and > > can even access it, so why can't I allow her to autologin? It's one less > > thing for her to worry about. > > That's an easy one to shoot down: > http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_817532.html?menu= > "One of the defendants, 71-year-old Durwood Pickle, said his teenage > grandchildren used his computer during visits to his home."
What? That is utterly irrelevant. It is her and her machine only. She lives with her elderly husband, and I dont think they can even work KMail properly, let alone Kazaa. Anyway, my policy is that access to that machine is limited at the PHYSICAL level, and I have decided it is sufficient. I fail to see why it's anybody else's right to question this, although I do see the point you're trying to make here. All I am saying is, that it is my decision to make whether to do it this way, not anybody elses, hence I will be most peeved if the decision is denied me, through its removal from kdm. > > > Secondly, I maintain a machine in the university PC labs for public CD > > burning of linux distros. I autologin it as guest user, and spawn the > > app. Now, if I couldn't use kdm to do it, I'd have to resort to another > > hack, which is potentially even worse :/ > > Console login with a curses app that is spawned from ~guest/.bashrc > that needs a password for the "quit" function and traps Ctrl-C and > Ctrl-Z. Oh, so the X11 app I wrote isn't good enough? We dont mind people opening terminals anyway, and the machine is effectively open access, so again, this doesn't matter. Non-root access to this machine is not cared about - at least, again, it is managed PHYSICALLY - not just anybody can get into our labs. If you were to come in, and ssh out from it, I don't care. Likewise, if you download a kazaa client, I dont care, although if I spot it, I WILL kill it ;) > > Thirdly, as kdm already does support it (excluding this minor regression, > > obviously!) why remove it? It's not like it's default, or even, arguably, > > easy to get working without editing files, so you can't enable it by > > mistake! > > Well, since it's there. But removing it would mean less code, and > less code means less potential bugs. > A third issue has come to mind ;) I work for the Xbox-Linux project, and for a while, gdm autologin was enabled to effectively turn the box into a set-top browser/mail client etc - trying to operate xdm, xvkbd et all with the xbox joypad is EXTREMELY tedious to say the least! David
