[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [FAQ] Passwordless logins don't work in KDM 3.2



On Wednesday 10 March 2004 17:22, Ron Johnson wrote:
<SNIP>

> > Firstly, my mother's PC - she is the only person who ever used it, and
> > can even access it, so why can't I allow her to autologin? It's one less
> > thing for her to worry about.
>
> That's an easy one to shoot down:
> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_817532.html?menu=
> "One of the defendants, 71-year-old Durwood Pickle, said his teenage
> grandchildren used his computer during visits to his home."

What? That is utterly irrelevant. It is her and her machine only. She lives 
with her elderly husband, and I dont think they can even work KMail properly, 
let alone Kazaa. Anyway, my policy is that access to that machine is limited 
at the PHYSICAL level, and I have decided it is sufficient. I fail to see why 
it's anybody else's right to question this, although I do see the point 
you're trying to make here.

All I am saying is, that it is my decision to make whether to do it this way, 
not anybody elses, hence I will be most peeved if the decision is denied me, 
through its removal from kdm.

>
> > Secondly, I maintain a machine in the university PC labs for public CD
> > burning of linux distros. I autologin it as guest user, and spawn the
> > app. Now, if I couldn't use kdm to do it, I'd have to resort to another
> > hack, which is potentially even worse :/
>
> Console login with a curses app that is spawned from ~guest/.bashrc
> that needs a password for the "quit" function and traps Ctrl-C and
> Ctrl-Z.

Oh, so the X11 app I wrote isn't good enough?     We dont mind people opening 
terminals anyway, and the machine is effectively open access, so again, this 
doesn't matter. Non-root access to this machine is not cared about - at 
least, again, it is managed PHYSICALLY - not just anybody can get into our 
labs.  If you were to come in, and ssh out from it, I don't care. Likewise, 
if you download a kazaa client, I dont care, although if I spot it, I WILL 
kill it ;)

> > Thirdly, as kdm already does support it (excluding this minor regression,
> > obviously!) why remove it? It's not like it's default, or even, arguably,
> > easy to get working without editing files, so you can't enable it by
> > mistake!
>
> Well, since it's there.  But removing it would mean less code, and
> less code means less potential bugs.
>

A third issue has come to mind ;)

I work for the Xbox-Linux project, and for a while, gdm autologin was enabled 
to effectively turn the box into a set-top browser/mail client etc - trying 
to operate xdm, xvkbd et all with the xbox joypad is EXTREMELY tedious to say 
the least!

David



Reply to: