Our school system has been running Fedora on our desktops since early 2008. During that time, our login screen has been managed by GDM and our desktop session has been GNOME. It doesn’t look like our desktop session is going to change any time soon, as we transitioned to GNOME Shell in Fedora 13 and the students and teachers have overwhelmingly preferred it to GNOME 2.

At our school we have a couple of IT policies that affect our login sessions. All lab computers that aren’t logged in have some form of screensaver running (not a black screen) as it helps students identify which computers are on and which aren’t at a glance. It also helps IT see which computers need to be checked. Logged in computers should never have a screensaver running and screen-locking is disabled as we have far more users than computers. Some may argue that these policies should be amended, but, for the moment, they are what they are.

In older versions of Fedora, gnome-screensaver was set to run in gdm with the floating Fedora bubbles coming on after a minute of disuse. The screensaver was inhibited during the login session (I experimented with changing the gconf settings so it didn’t come on for 100 hours and other such nonsense, but inhibiting the screensaver was the only way I found that worked reliably over long periods of time).

With Fedora 16 we now have a much more beautiful new version of GDM, but, unfortunately, the gnome-screensaver that comes with it no longer allows you to actually show a screensaver. I decided to try using xscreensaver instead, but it cannot run in GDM. It keeps complaining that something else is grabbing the keyboard, and I can only assume that something is GDM. Finally, I can’t even write a simple screensaver program in python as it seems I can’t even run a full-screen app over the GDM screen.

Add to all that the fact that we have 1000+ students in the school who are able to log into any lab computer and GDM lists all users who ever logged into the computer. Which theoretically could be 1000. Urgh!

So for our Fedora 16 system, I’ve switched over to lxdm. A quick configuration change to tell it to boot gnome-shell as its default session (and some hacks so it doesn’t try to remember what language the last user used to log in) and it was set. Xscreensaver runs just fine over it and we now have some pretty pictures of Lebanon and the school in a carousel as our login screensaver.

It looks like the screensaver functionality will get merged straight into gnome-shell, and, if it does, we may be able to have extensions that actually implement the screensaver. If that happens, and if GDM re-acquires the ability to not show the user list, we’ll switch back to GDM. Until then, we’ll stick with lxdm.

Now I just need to work out how to inhibit gnome-screensaver during login as gnome-screensaver --inhibit no longer works. I’m sure there was a good reason for removing that code, but for the life of me I can’t work out what it was…

We had a blast at the InstallQuest last Friday! I’d say that roughly 20 people showed up, and most of them were students from LES Loueizeh and LES Tyre.

We started at 4:00PM with a short introduction to Linux in general, and then Fedora and Ubuntu. David Correia (the Elementary Coordinator in Tyre), Paul-Marc Bougharios (a local Fedora Ambassador), and I presented Unity, KDE and GNOME Shell respectively. We then took a quick break, and started both the installs and the sessions.

The Sessions

My wife, Naomi, gave a talk on creating documents using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, and then exporting them as PDFs so anyone with a computer can read them. She was only supposed to go for fifteen minutes, but there was so much interest that she ended up going over thirty minutes.

Hisham Hamdan, the Assistant System Administrator here in Loueizeh, then did a session on package management and system updates. We broke for pizza (generously provided by the school), and returned to a session on photo editing using the GIMP by David. He showed how to desaturate a photograph except for one small element.

Finally, I finished off the sessions with a short demo on how to use photorec (part of testdisk) to recover photos deleted off of an SD card.

The Installs

While the sessions were happening in the main computer room, where people could either use the school computers or their own, the installs were happening in the small computer room next door. We had cleared the computers from the room, leaving a few monitors, keyboards and mice just in case anyone brought desktops without the peripherals (which ended up being pointless; all of the installs were done on laptops). We left the network cables in the room and did PXE installs where possible.

Both Tyre and Loueizeh use Fedora with GNOME Shell as our default desktop, so I wasn’t too surprised that a majority of the guests chose to install Fedora. What did surprise me was the number that chose KDE. Paul-Marc did an excellent job of demonstrating just how functional (and pretty) KDE has become. For someone who hasn’t used KDE since my Mandrake days, and who hasn’t looked at KDE since 4.0 came out, it was quite the eye-opener! KDE has become very impressive, and, while I prefer the simplicity of the Shell, I can see why many are so passionate about it.

We probably ended up doing about fifteen installs, with the final one ending just before 11:00PM. We only had one failure, a laptop with a BIOS password that the owner didn’t know.

Lessons learned

While I thought the InstallQuest went well for the first time around, there are a few things I’d love to see done differently the next time around. The sessions were a big hit, but there was some disruption as people would have to leave their installs to attend a session, and then try to pick up from where they stopped. We may try to split the sessions from the installs next time around.

I would also like to see more people from the other Linux communities in Lebanon involved. We had good representation for Fedora, but only one person came to represent Ubuntu, and there was nobody from the other communities.

Related to this, we need to do a lot more advertising the next time around. While we did advertise on the Fedora and Ubuntu Lebanon mailing lists, and on a few other Lebanon-specific open source sites, I’m convinced we didn’t do as well as we could at reaching out to the schools and universities here in Lebanon.

We will be doing another InstallQuest, probably in January or February. By making some simple changes, we hope to make it an even bigger success.

A huge thank you to those involved in making the InstallQuest a success: Hisham, Paul-Marc, David, Naomi, Steve White, the principal of LES Loueizeh, and all those those who participated.

InstallQuest logo – Released under a CC-BY license. Modified from USB Flash Drive by Ambuj Saxena