Ubuntu Wiki

This is a short specification of what could be improved in the lightdm-gtk-greeter and what design it could feature. It will show a few mockups and describe the functionality the gtk-greeter should gain.

There's also another (collaborative) effort with folks from Lubuntu to improve the greeter: link

Launchpad Project

Features

• Show clock/date
• Integrate accessibility menu and shutdown/restart menu into login-box and drop top panel
• Lock the screen
• Correctly scale the wallpaper/background

• Better multi-monitor support (as laid out here)

Screen Lock (Postponed)

Todo list:

• find which dbus call is used to lock the session with lightdm (cf. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lightdm-team/lightdm/trunk/view/head:/tests/src/test-session.c#L45)

  • There is a command that does this, gdmflexiserver
  • This command does the dbus call as such

    • dbus-send --system --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DisplayManager $XDG_SEAT_PATH org.freedesktop.DisplayManager.Seat.SwitchToGreeter

      • Neither Seat.SwitchToGreeter, nor Seat.Lock or Session.Lock seem to really lock the session, instead lightdm gets respawned at tty9.

• update action plugin from xfce4-panel (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tree/plugins/actions/actions.c#n963, probably not needed, xflock4 is called)

• update xflock4 (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/tree/scripts/xflock4)

• update xfce4-power-manager (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-power-manager/tree/common/xfpm-common.c#n82, add a call to xflock4 first)

• test?

The Plan

• Modify xflock4 and run tests

  • Panel > Action Buttons (Done)

  • xflock4 from Terminal (Done)

  • Power Manager > Suspend

• Modify the greeter so that certain widgets are not shown (or are insensitive) when used as a lock screen.
  • User Selection combobox
  • Session combobox
  • Language combobox

• Add a Switch User button

Mockups

• Here's an interesting mockup taken from Debian's artwork contest, entitled 7th-element.

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