Design notes for the Greeter

Scenarios

Kiosk

See also:

Home User

Small Office User

Large Institution

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?

Projects/GDM/NewDesign/Greeter (last edited 2013-11-21 18:48:09 by WilliamJonMcCann)