Weblog

Friday November 04, 2005

GDM News

Just yesterday I finished a few weeks of work redesigning the way that the GDM daemon manages its configuration. Now instead of having globals shared all over the place, pretty much all vicious-extensions logic is encapsulated in one file. Access functions are used to ensure that the same validation gets done when a value is updated as when its initially read in. This reorganization makes the UPDATE_CONFIG and GET_CONFIG commands much simpler and generally makes the code simpler. My long-term plans are to make all the GDM slaves get their configuration data via the socket protocol (GET_CONFIG) and eliminate all code from the slaves that access the configuration file directly. This will make it possible to do some interesting new things with GDM configuration. Mainly I want GDM to support system-wide and machine-specific configuration, so you can have the system-wide defaults in one file and have a gdm.conf-local file which has overrides for a specific machine. This should make it easier to manage GDM in large networks. Dennis Cranston has done some amazing work redesigning gdmsetup to follow Calum's UI recommendations. It looks great and is worth checking out if you are brave enough to try CVS head. I'm thinking about doing a new 2.8 release sometime soon since some great fixes have been put in the stable branch in the past few weeks.

In other news, I've been working on GStreamer 0.9 getting it to work on Solaris, and have some patches that I need to submit to bugzilla - should get that done early next week. Getting the new liboil GStreamer dependency working on Solaris was a bit of work. I also got distracted a bit getting Python XML bindings working on Solaris 10. A bit of a headache, but now Solaris 10 can work with Python/XML. Next I need to get started porting the sunaudio plugin to 0.9. I also want to try and get the gnome-about-me working applet on Solaris.