Description of problem: Provide an intuitive way for people in home computing situations to switch to a new desktop user without having to logout of the other user's session. I think gdmflexiserver as it functions in fedora core 2 is good enough to be useful as the command to run from a "switch user" menu item. The only problem I see is the lag in starting up a new gdm login screen, but functionality using gdmflexiserver seems to act as I would expect when logging in a new user, switching to existing running desktops and logging out of a desktop and switching back to an existing desktop. All without invoking the alt-ctl-# salute to bounce back and forth. The gdmflexiserver chooser dialog keeps me from having to use the keyboard shortcut magic. There is probably a corner case when there are N > 2 open desktops and you logout of a desktop, how do you know which user desktop to go back to if there are 2 or more remaining. Other than hacking up xscreensaver to be able to support moving over to another display I've no suggestions. But I don't think this is a very large concern. The alt-ctl-# salute still exists to get out of these situations. So I say, put gdmflexiserver into use in a menu item and see how badly its recieved as a "switch user" utility.
There is a project that seems to fit most of the tenants of my original comment. In case you are still paying attention to this report. http://ignore-your.tv/fusa/ Fast User Switch Applet
Hi Jef, I think it's already in the menus. Although it's a bit broken wrt to console user , etc. The desktop core team has discussed the applet before and the possiblity of including it and fixing all the problems that get caused by having more than one user logged in at the same time. Note, xscreensaver has a New Login button also (not enabled by default).
holy crap thats great! In the menus in rawhide? Can i re-enable the login button in xscreensaver in rawhide? I'm more than happy to poke around at this and give more feedback. multiple users on the box at the same time has a number of console user permission issues, to be sure. I'd love to spend some time running into more of them and hurting myself. -jef
Hi Jef, Hat -> System Tools -> New Login The xscreensaver thing is a compile time option, so you'd have to recompile the src rpms after changing the spec file. getting multiple user login to work well is a project we've discussed before. The FC5 development cycle has just started, so it'll no doubt come up again as potential project to work on.
This has been fixed a long time ago.