Design notes for the Greeter
Scenarios
Kiosk
Use Boot Screen
Only offer guest user.
Automatic login for guest user.
See also:
Home User
Small Office User
Use Boot Screen
Display User Chooser
Large Institution
Use Boot Screen
- Display Domain/Realm chooser?
Display User Chooser
Interfaces
[BobDoolittle]: Allow greeter to be used separably by other PAM clients - i.e. stable protocol and interface to greeter
[BobDoolittle]: Allow greeter widgets/theme to be configured/deconfigured for use with other PAM clients
Boot Screen
- Display a "throbber".
- Show boot error messages?
Automatic Login
- After a certain time (possibly zero) a certain user is automatically logged in.
- Sufficient to just have the greeter select a user after a certain amount of time and let PAM do the rest?
Interactive Guest User
- Allow the user to set up name, email?
- Allow authentication to web service as sufficient for login
- Store web service auth key in cookie?
Guest User
- Uid/Gid should be automatically created at login so that there can be more than one guest at a time.
- Home directory should be created at login
- Home directory should be removed at logout
- Does not have/require a password
- Disable remote login (SSH, XDMCP?)
[BobDoolittle]: Consider implementing all of this in a PAM module for modularity
[BobDoolittle]: Note if pam_conv never called, no GDM screens should be rendered
Also see:
User Chooser
- Should always remember the last, recent, most frequent user
Configuration Tools
- A system setup tool to run at first startup (or until configured)
- Create a user
- Set time / timezone
- Setup new hardware
- Unknown keyboard detected
- Bluetooth devices (keyboard / mouse) may be required for login
- Fingerprint readers
Issues
- How should we specify per-user/user-class default sessions?