LightDM-KDE

[Harald Sitter]

On Thursday 09 June 2011 20:57:04 David Edmundson wrote:
> For the KDE side of things I intend to have a QML powered greeter
> engine. This will display any QML file as the greeter, and provide all
> the linking to the LightDM daemon and general models and such.
> 
> This enables anyone to build a login theme without any compiling, and
> makes it completely safe for the end user.
> I've outlined my goals/design/reasoning in more detail here:
> http://static.davidedmundson.co.uk/lightdm_goals.txt

Sounds awesome.
I'd like to propose two goals though:
a) accessible
b) scalibility (should work well with ldap setups with >10 users etc.)

> There is also a shiny picture of what my demo greeter looks like here:
> http://static.davidedmundson.co.uk/lightdm_2.png. Note the use of
> plasma widgets.
> It's not finished, but it shows what I'm doing. I imagine kubuntu will
> want to Kubuntu-ify it a bit. If anyone has any designs let me know.

Mockup by sheytan: http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/7461/basegi.jpg
I believe this would be a good default. Something I never liked about the 
current KDM default is that you cannot click somewhere to select your user, 
but instead had to know your user name *eeek*.
To that extent the user name login box perhaps should be non-editable if you 
selected a user and only become editable on click. Just a random thought 
though.

> This is in development here:
> http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fdavidedmundson%2Flightdmqmlgreeter.git&
> a=summary There is a demo theme here:
> http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fdavidedmundson%2Flightdmdemogreeter.git
> &a=summary
> 
> It requires the latest master of lightdm to compile (lp:lightdm).

Could someone get this in a PPA please or perhaps the neon people could get 
weekly builds going?

> I've made a bit of a start on the KDM settings module, but I don't
> know any policyKit so will get stuck with that shortly. I'm working on
> kde's git repos as I want this to be an upstream thing, though the
> general feedback on my blog was fairly negative so I've not approached
> anyone yet.

With polkit we can help. I think just about everyone in the programming part 
of the team had done polkit at one point or another.

As for the comments: you should beware of how important they are. They neither 
reflect common opinion nor particularly technical reasoning (especially the 
ones on your post from a quick glance). The only two valuable concerns I 
noticed were: supreme PAM support and enterprise readiness. Both things that 
should entirely be secured before going anywhere with LightDM IMHO.

> Moving forwards, I think I should take discussion about KDE and
> LightDM off the kubuntu ML and maybe onto the LightDM ML? I'm not sure
> if I'm bugging people. I also need some opinions from you and to get
> some more people on board.

If you feel it makes more sense there... Having stuff here is not particularly 
distrubing though, especially since we get free status updates that way :P

What sort of people do you need?

regards,
Harald