Hi,
Since the previous thread seems to be getting ignored, can someone from the desktop team, let me know what you think of this? It would be nice to a guest user by default on the live cd. We can get some feedback, if we make this happen by Fedora 11 beta release.
Rahul
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 03:39 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
Since the previous thread seems to be getting ignored, can someone from the desktop team, let me know what you think of this? It would be nice to a guest user by default on the live cd. We can get some feedback, if we make this happen by Fedora 11 beta release.
I don't see why not. But then, I also don't see much point in having a guest account on a live cd.
Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 03:39 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
Since the previous thread seems to be getting ignored, can someone from the desktop team, let me know what you think of this? It would be nice to a guest user by default on the live cd. We can get some feedback, if we make this happen by Fedora 11 beta release.
I don't see why not. But then, I also don't see much point in having a guest account on a live cd.
It won't be that useful as a live cd as such but since we are recommending the desktop live cd as the primary point of entry for new users at http://get.fedoraproject.org/, it would be quite useful for desktop users once people use the live cd to install them to their hard disk, I think.
Rahul
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 06:46 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
It won't be that useful as a live cd as such but since we are recommending the desktop live cd as the primary point of entry for new users at http://get.fedoraproject.org/, it would be quite useful for desktop users once people use the live cd to install them to their hard disk, I think.
Fair enough. I'm sure people will bitch about this poking unasked wholes in their system security.
What do others think ?
On Tuesday, March 10 2009, Matthias Clasen said:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 06:46 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
It won't be that useful as a live cd as such but since we are recommending the desktop live cd as the primary point of entry for new users at http://get.fedoraproject.org/, it would be quite useful for desktop users once people use the live cd to install them to their hard disk, I think.
Fair enough. I'm sure people will bitch about this poking unasked wholes in their system security.
What do others think ?
I think making xguest more accessible is a Good Thing (tm) and that having it in the live images/installed by default is a part of that. But the other part is perhaps the "how do I make it easy to turn off" -- right now, that involves removing the package afaik. Having it be an easy "turn off the account in system-config-users[1]" would probably make it even more awesome.
That said, let's put it in the beta and see what more people think :-) Worst case is we get some xguest testing with the beta (which isn't bad either)
Jeremy
[1] Or whatever tool we're saying is used for graphically adding/removing users today :)
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 09:40 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
On Tuesday, March 10 2009, Matthias Clasen said:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 06:46 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
It won't be that useful as a live cd as such but since we are recommending the desktop live cd as the primary point of entry for new users at http://get.fedoraproject.org/, it would be quite useful for desktop users once people use the live cd to install them to their hard disk, I think.
Fair enough. I'm sure people will bitch about this poking unasked wholes in their system security.
What do others think ?
I think making xguest more accessible is a Good Thing (tm) and that having it in the live images/installed by default is a part of that. But the other part is perhaps the "how do I make it easy to turn off" -- right now, that involves removing the package afaik. Having it be an easy "turn off the account in system-config-users[1]" would probably make it even more awesome.
That said, let's put it in the beta and see what more people think :-) Worst case is we get some xguest testing with the beta (which isn't bad either)
Can you add a +xguest to fedora-livecd-desktop.ks ? For some reason I seem to have lost my git fu there...
On Wednesday, March 11 2009, Matthias Clasen said:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 09:40 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
On Tuesday, March 10 2009, Matthias Clasen said:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 06:46 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
It won't be that useful as a live cd as such but since we are recommending the desktop live cd as the primary point of entry for new users at http://get.fedoraproject.org/, it would be quite useful for desktop users once people use the live cd to install them to their hard disk, I think.
Fair enough. I'm sure people will bitch about this poking unasked wholes in their system security.
What do others think ?
I think making xguest more accessible is a Good Thing (tm) and that having it in the live images/installed by default is a part of that. But the other part is perhaps the "how do I make it easy to turn off" -- right now, that involves removing the package afaik. Having it be an easy "turn off the account in system-config-users[1]" would probably make it even more awesome.
That said, let's put it in the beta and see what more people think :-) Worst case is we get some xguest testing with the beta (which isn't bad either)
Can you add a +xguest to fedora-livecd-desktop.ks ? For some reason I seem to have lost my git fu there...
Done. Will make sure with kanarip/f13 that it doesn't need to be on the branch and if so, will get it merged over also.
Jeremy
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 15:14 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
That said, let's put it in the beta and see what more people think :-) Worst case is we get some xguest testing with the beta (which isn't bad either)
Can you add a +xguest to fedora-livecd-desktop.ks ? For some reason I seem to have lost my git fu there...
Done. Will make sure with kanarip/f13 that it doesn't need to be on the branch and if so, will get it merged over also.
Thanks, Jeremy.
It might also be worthwhile to make sure that this gets mentioned in the beta release notes, together with some hints for how to turn it off (rpm -e xguest or userdel xguest).
Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 15:14 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
That said, let's put it in the beta and see what more people think :-) Worst case is we get some xguest testing with the beta (which isn't bad either)
Can you add a +xguest to fedora-livecd-desktop.ks ? For some reason I seem to have lost my git fu there...
Done. Will make sure with kanarip/f13 that it doesn't need to be on the branch and if so, will get it merged over also.
Thanks, Jeremy.
It might also be worthwhile to make sure that this gets mentioned in the beta release notes, together with some hints for how to turn it off (rpm -e xguest or userdel xguest).
I have added the release notes at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#Desktop_Guest_Us...
You might want to consider including xguest by default in the Fedora DVD image as well. Jesse Keating?
Rahul
On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 19:55 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
I have added the release notes at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#Desktop_Guest_Us...
You might want to consider including xguest by default in the Fedora DVD image as well. Jesse Keating?
Getting it on the install media should be as easy as making it a default in one of the comps groups.
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 19:55 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
I have added the release notes at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#Desktop_Guest_Us...
You might want to consider including xguest by default in the Fedora DVD image as well. Jesse Keating?
Getting it on the install media should be as easy as making it a default in one of the comps groups.
Which group would be appropriate? Can you do this?
Rahul
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Rahul Sundaram said:
Getting it on the install media should be as easy as making it a default in one of the comps groups.
Which group would be appropriate? Can you do this?
Presumably, gnome-desktop?
Can someone in the desktop team please confirm that, you agree to this?
Rahul
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 21:54 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Rahul Sundaram said:
Getting it on the install media should be as easy as making it a default in one of the comps groups.
Which group would be appropriate? Can you do this?
Presumably, gnome-desktop?
Can someone in the desktop team please confirm that, you agree to this?
After some irc discussion, I've now put xguest as optional entry in the base-x group, since it is not really gnome specific.
Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 21:54 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Rahul Sundaram said:
Getting it on the install media should be as easy as making it a default in one of the comps groups.
Which group would be appropriate? Can you do this?
Presumably, gnome-desktop?
Can someone in the desktop team please confirm that, you agree to this?
After some irc discussion, I've now put xguest as optional entry in the base-x group, since it is not really gnome specific.
My goal was to get the desktop live cd experience to match the Fedora DVD experience as closely as possible. Now, you will get xguest by default only if you install from the live cd. I think such deviations should be avoided. Speaking from the documentation perspective, these things are very much a pain.
Rahul
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 22:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
My goal was to get the desktop live cd experience to match the Fedora DVD experience as closely as possible. Now, you will get xguest by default only if you install from the live cd. I think such deviations should be avoided. Speaking from the documentation perspective, these things are very much a pain.
In this case, we're using the Beta as an experiment, not as a final setting. Where to put the package in comps is a real problem when you consider interaction with other DEs and WMs and LMs, particularly at this stage of the freeze. If things go well with xguest being on the Live image we can then discuss how to appropriately place it in comps after beta.
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 09:59 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 22:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
My goal was to get the desktop live cd experience to match the Fedora DVD experience as closely as possible. Now, you will get xguest by default only if you install from the live cd. I think such deviations should be avoided. Speaking from the documentation perspective, these things are very much a pain.
In this case, we're using the Beta as an experiment, not as a final setting. Where to put the package in comps is a real problem when you consider interaction with other DEs and WMs and LMs, particularly at this stage of the freeze. If things go well with xguest being on the Live image we can then discuss how to appropriately place it in comps after beta.
Indeed, just an experiment.
After playing a bit with it, I am pretty convinced that we don't want xguest by default in F11. We are just fooling ourselves if we think that having "Guest" appear on the gdm login screen means that we have a working guest account. The current xguest package is more like a technology demo that shows that selinux does indeed make it possible to tightly lock down a lot of desktop features without adjusting the UI at all.
If we want to have a meaningful guest account we will have to do the same hard work that the Ubuntu guys did of defining the use cases, figuring out what the guest is supposed to do, and adjust the guest session to actually reflect these abilities.
Here are some things I noticed in 10 minutes of using a xguest session:
- When logging into the xguest account, I get a regular default gnome desktop, with the difference that a lot of things don't work (except for firefox).
- For some reason, gnome-power-manager is not running in the xguest session.
- I tried to open a web page with epiphany, and it didn't work, while doing it in firefox works just fine. But still, epiphany is in the menus.
- I inserted a usb stick, and got some nautilus dialogs, but unlocking the encrypted partition didn't work, probably because /media was not visible.
- None of the PolicyKit policies have been adapted to reflect that xguest will not be able to do much of anything.
On top of this, xguest seems to have some serious issues, see e.g. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=491924
Matthias
One more xguest problem I forgot to mention:
- When selinux is not in enforcing mode, logging into the guest account doesn't work. And it fails without any error message.
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
- When selinux is not in enforcing mode, logging into the guest account
doesn't work. And it fails without any error message.
I thought that the option wasn't even available when not in enforcing mode. But I agree, this seems to be a "look what SELinux can do!" rather than something with immediate practical applications.
That being said, it would be great if someone could write down a list of exactly what usecases we're trying to get at with xguest, and work with Dan to make that a reality. Unfortunately I don't think that I'm a good candidate for that, since I'm not your typical desktop user :)
On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 19:47 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
That being said, it would be great if someone could write down a list of exactly what usecases we're trying to get at with xguest, and work with Dan to make that a reality. Unfortunately I don't think that I'm a good candidate for that, since I'm not your typical desktop user :)
Dan himself is describing his xguest as more akin to a kiosk system than to a guest account.
Here are some links:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300489 Windows XP https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Intrepid/GuestAccount Ubuntu https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/GuestUser our own (blank) slate...
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