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[Bug 1350357] [NEW] Support disabling of user switching per seat

 

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Let me start by saying it's possible I'm missing some subtleties here,
and if so, I'd be happy to get a more detailed explanation.

In LightDM 1.10.1 (Trusty), unity seats are forced to enable user
switching (in seat-unity.c).  However, I think this is something that
should be configurable in the display manager.  In a public computing
environment, fast-user-switching is undesirable, as it interferes with
serial re-usability and various cleanup tasks.  Most public computing
labs want to maintain a 1-1 relationship between individuals and
workstations, and a workstation should either be in use by one user, or
not in use at all.  In the past, our site has accomplished this in
various desktop environment configurations (such as the
org.gnome.desktop.lockdown gsettings, etc).  Unfortunately, most of
these settings are ignored in Unity (I have filed separate bugs about
those).

Obviously, there are workarounds, including stealing all the other VTs,
or playing stupid D-Bus games, or wrapping X.  Currently, our preferred
("preferred") solution is to have our custom greeter check logind and
refuse to do anything other than unlock the existing session if a user
is already logged in on an X seat, but that's not ideal, because you
still end up with a second greeter running, and in fact that becomes the
primary greeter when the original user logs out.

That having been said, I believe it is the system administrator's
prerogative to dictate that there shall be one and only one seat
available on any given workstation, and instruct LightDM not to spawn
any additional ones.  It would be great if this was added in future
releases.   Alternatively, if that's not possible because of Unity
design, it would be great if there was a way for a greeter to say to
lightdm "I'm done, this seat is shutting down, switch back to an
original session."  (And obviously, doing that if there is no other
session to switch to would be an error).

** Affects: lightdm
     Importance: Wishlist
     Assignee: Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)
         Status: Fix Released

** Affects: lightdm/1.10
     Importance: Wishlist
         Status: Fix Committed

** Affects: lightdm (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Support disabling of user switching per seat
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1350357
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