This is a short specification of what could be improved in the lightdm-gtk-greeter and what design it could feature. It will show a few mockups and describe the functionality the gtk-greeter should gain.
There's also another (collaborative) effort with folks from Lubuntu to improve the greeter: link
Features
- Show clock/date
- Integrate accessibility menu and shutdown/restart menu into login-box and drop top panel
- Lock the screen
- Correctly scale the wallpaper/background
Better multi-monitor support (as laid out here)
Screen Lock (Postponed)
Todo list:
find which dbus call is used to lock the session with lightdm (cf. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lightdm-team/lightdm/trunk/view/head:/tests/src/test-session.c#L45)
- There is a command that does this, gdmflexiserver
- This command does the dbus call as such
dbus-send --system --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DisplayManager $XDG_SEAT_PATH org.freedesktop.DisplayManager.Seat.SwitchToGreeter
Neither Seat.SwitchToGreeter, nor Seat.Lock or Session.Lock seem to really lock the session, instead lightdm gets respawned at tty9.
update action plugin from xfce4-panel (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tree/plugins/actions/actions.c#n963, probably not needed, xflock4 is called)
update xflock4 (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/tree/scripts/xflock4)
update xfce4-power-manager (cf. http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-power-manager/tree/common/xfpm-common.c#n82, add a call to xflock4 first)
- test?
The Plan
- Modify xflock4 and run tests
Panel > Action Buttons (Done)
xflock4 from Terminal (Done)
Power Manager > Suspend
- Modify the greeter so that certain widgets are not shown (or are insensitive) when used as a lock screen.
- User Selection combobox
- Session combobox
- Language combobox
Add a Switch User button
Mockups
Here's an interesting mockup taken from Debian's artwork contest, entitled 7th-element.
