Re: Login Panel Setup

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Maurice,

Maurice Metternich wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I'm trying to make my OS as NeXT-ish as possible. However I've been 
> missing a good login manager. Eventually I came across loginpanel, 
> which seems to be pretty neat. So I compiled it and got the 
> loginpanel.app file. How do I set this up now? What files do I have to 
> edit in order to start the login panel before starting windowmaker.
Noble attempt! I miss the same thing you miss too...
You should start loginpanel as root once X is running. The way I usually 
debug it is to launch X without a windowmanager or anything, then open a 
second console and launch loginpanel.

But I have some bad news for you: loginpanel is unfinished. YOu may 
noticed that it doesn't have a release file, no tarball. You must have 
gotten its sources from SVN, didn't you?
It was written long time ago and is unfinished, I tried several times to 
improve it and fix it, but without success. I was able to update the 
code and have it working on current computers, but there is a major 
problem: when you exit your last session application (which ideally is 
GWorkspace, but most often it is your windowmanager) the session manager 
should kill all running applications before returning to the login prompt.
Loginpanel fails to kill all applications, so if you don't quit all 
applications, you end up having stuff that still runs, clearly wrong.
> One thing I have to say that I'm new to this stuff. Having hardly used 
> Linux before (expect for a basic Ubuntu installation) I switched to it 
> from Mac OS X about 2 weeks ago. I'm currently using Debian since it's 
> the only distribution that officially supports PowerPC processors (I'm 
> on a PowerMac G5).
Very nice that you are interested in this. I am running GNUstep too on 
PPC hardware running debian linux, a old G3 clamshell iBook, but have 
lots of problems with drivers and stability. Most applications don't run 
properly on PPC anymore (because they are badly written for intel). I 
try to make sure that GNUstep stuff works on PPC and so far it does!

My advice here is to do without a session manager at all (authenticate 
through console and then run startx) or use another, light-weight 
session manager. I usually do the former, but on one computer I just run 
xdm.
The third option, if you are a unix programmer, is to help fixing stuff.

Riccardo