DesktopUNESession

Revision 5 as of 2009-11-30 13:31:13

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  • Launchpad Entry: desktop-lucid-unr-session

  • Created: 2009-11-25

  • Contributors: Rick Spencer, Martin Pitt, Sebastien Bacher, Didier Roche

  • Packages affected:

Summary

Create an alternative desktop session for Ubuntu Desktop Edition 10.04, so users can engage with the Ubuntu Netbook Edition experience.

Release Note

Ubuntu 10.04 provides an Ubuntu Netbook Edition session for traditional desktop users. On a classical Ubuntu installation, users can now install the desktop-une-session package, which adds a new session type "Desktop Ubuntu Netbook Remix" in the GDM login manager.

Rationale

Ubuntu Desktop Edition 10.04 is an LTS release, so few to no disruptive changes will land this cycle. The Alternative Desktop Session will allow Ubuntu Desktop users to experience the new and interesting work going into Ubuntu Netbook Edition without get constraint to stick with it.

The objectives are:

  1. Increase exposure to the Ubuntu Netbook Edition interface.
  2. Allow Ubuntu Desktop users, who may not use or own a netbook, to easily install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition interface and enable it as their default session.
  3. Allow Ubuntu Desktop users who have installed and enabled the Alternative Desktop Session to easily revert to using the normal Ubuntu Desktop.

Use Cases

  • Fred heard about UNE and wants to give it a try. Nevertheless, he doesn't want to install UNE from scratch without being able to revert to his vanilla desktop session.
  • Robert has UNE installed and want (for development, for instance), run the usual and well-known ubuntu-desktop without having two different ubuntu installation on his netbook (less upgrade/install to do, less space used...).

Scope

  • packages currently heavily depending on ubuntu-netbook-remix and not in ubuntu-desktop:
    • go-home-applet
    • netbook-launcher
    • maximus
    • ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings
    • webfav
    • window-picker-applet

Design

  1. User should only have to select his session.
  2. As UNE has a lot of particular gconf keys changing the defaults or users option, we have to provide an additional path to gconfd. Further investigation showed that gconfd (launched as a dbus service) can't access to session wrapper export variables.
  3. The GDMSESSION variable is available in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/* and so, we can get access to the right gconf path whatever session we want.
  4. In a first attempt (until bug #... about default gconf session is fixed), we can try to create a separate package for this. But merging with u-n-e package would be possible once providing a default gconf session (needed also when installing xubuntu and mythbuntu, for instance)
  5. This will also making the opposite available: installing first UNE and then ubuntu-dekstop.

Implementation

temporary (see above) une-session package

Package une-session:

  • provides a new session type /usr/share/xsessions/desktop-une.desktop, running /usr/bin/desktop-une-session

  • une-session is a shell script which defines GDMSESSION=desktop-une and runs /usr/bin/gnome-session

  • pulls Ubuntu Netbook Edition packages, (see below)
    • [ to be completed once fully implemented ]

Migration

No migration is involved, this should not ever become the default session. But user can change it afteward thanks to the work on gdmsetup.

Test/Demo Plan

CategorySpec