[798] in athena10
Re: Changes to debathena-gdm-config
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Jan 8 14:55:44 2009
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Cc: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>, Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>,
athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901081439310.26091@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:55:50 -0500
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That corrects part of the problem.
The thing that seemed intractably difficult to me was, "How do we help
people understand that the Failsafe options are not what is meant by
'Last Session'?"
Along the way, it seemed reasonable to get rid of the "Secure Remote
Connection" because it's useless, and might mislead someone into trying
to use it, when there are very VERY few systems on campus that can even
answer the connection opened by it.
-Bill
On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 14:41 -0500, Tim Abbott wrote:
> Why not just rename the "Run Xclient Script" session to e.g. "Athena" or
> "Athena standard session" or something similarly unambiguous?
>
> -Tim Abbott
>
> On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, Bill Cattey wrote:
>
> > The problem created goes like this:
> >
> > The current session choices on offer from the Athena 10 Login greeter
> > are:
> >
> > Last session
> > 1. Run Xclient script
> > 2. GNOME
> > 3. Secure Remote Connection
> > Failsafe GNOME
> > Failsafe Terminal
> >
> > To someone unfamiliar with the nitty gritty of how sessions actually are
> > implemented, there is much room for users hurting themselves by making
> > the wrong choice.
> >
> > The least toxic of these choices is #3. It's merely useless. The reason
> > why it shows up is that it's picked up by what got installed by default
> > in /usr/share/xsessions. Choice #2 is also picked up from there.
> >
> > I classify choice #3 as toxic because it looks to a naive user like it
> > is the session to pick. As a naive user myself, I saw, "Last session"
> > and decided that after I'd run Failsafe, that I needed to select a
> > session to stop being logged in Failsafe. Knowing I needed to run
> > GNOME, I picked #2, broke things, and never really clued into how,
> > "You're just supposed to know to Run Xclient Script".
> >
> > Short answer to your question: It seems like the simplest way to avoid
> > picking up session types that will help users screw themselves is to
> > leave them out of the search path on Athena Workstation.
> >
> > Does this clarify?
>
