[LightDM] falling back to other greeters if one fails

[Robert Ancell]

Hi Andre,

There is not a feature to provide a fallback greeter.

What LightDM attempts to do if it fails to start a greeter is to exit and
let the OS handle this failure case. In Ubuntu we start a "failsafe X
session" to get the user to fix their configuration.

We intentionally don't pick another greeter if one fails, since each
greeter may have different levels of security access. We also don't provide
any greeter with LightDM since that puts a dependency on a specific GUI
technology and the daemon is GUI agnostic.

In saying that, I do think there is a case to be able to configure more
than one greeter. I think this would be best implemented in lightdm.conf
with:
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=primary-greeter:secondary-greeter:tertiary-greeter

i.e. We start secondary-greeter if primary-greeter fails for some reason.
If none of the greeters work we exit.

File a bug and/or propose a branch!

Thanks,
--Robert


On 22 July 2013 22:24, Andre Klärner <kandre at ak-online.be> wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> I love lightdm and am using it exclusively on all my debian machines, but
> recently during an OS upgrade I foolishly upgraded Gnome to 3.8 which broke
> the lightdm-gtk-greeter. So it took me a while to figure out that my theme
> broke the greeter as the engine it uses has a bug in it.
>
> So my question to you is: is there a feature to provide a fallback greeter
> in case the first one exits within a few seconds and keeps repeating over
> and over again or would it be even better to provide a really small builtin
> greeter that does nothing more than the bare minimum: ask for user and
> password and logon a session with nothing more that e.g. Xlib (I am
> thinking of something as simplistic as xscreensavers dependancies).
>
> Thanks and kind regards,
> Andre
>
> --
> Andre Klärner
>
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