[Oneiric-Topic] LightDM for display management

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 13 avril 2011 à 10:26 +1000, Robert Ancell a écrit :
> Sure, there are definitely a number of required services.  Note I'm not
> ruling out running a GNOME session, it just depends if you can have a
> cut down enough session to make it work.  The services you require in a
> login screen (basically power management, networking, audio) really are
> all system services - I hope that GNOME is working towards taking these
> things out of the session in the future.
They're actually out of session for the most part: gnome-power-manager
is merely talking to upower, nm-applet to NetworkManager,
gnome-volume-control applet to pulseaudio (though which is per-session
in Ubuntu IIRC). But you need something to display a GUI, you can't only
rely on a system service. In GNOME 3, network and volume control are
even handled directly from the Shell's process, and the GDM greeter
could do the same.

Also, if you want accessibility, you have to start a magnifier, a
screenreader, or an on-screen keyboard per-session.

So I don't think you can really be more lightweight than GDM *if* you
want to implement all of these. You can consider they're not essential
for most people and use a stripped-down DM, but you won't have those
features. Tradeoffs...


Cheers