"Guest session" menu item can be confusing

I suggest that that only one guest be able to log in at a time. Then "Guest" appear at the end of the list of user accounts, rather than as a command.

Indeed that's actually the same problem as in bug 270342. Since there can't really sanely two guest sessions at the same time, it would be nice if the "Guest sesssion" entry could only appear if there isn't a session running already.

If it helps, I can add a helper script like "/usr/share/gdm/guest-session/session-running" or so. Or you just check if user "guest" has a session running.

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 14:35 +0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Indeed that's actually the same problem as in bug 270342. Since there
> can't really sanely two guest sessions at the same time, it would be
> nice if the "Guest sesssion" entry could only appear if there isn't a
> session running already.

Okay, I marked it as a duplicate.

> If it helps, I can add a helper script like "/usr/share/gdm/guest-
> session/session-running" or so. Or you just check if user "guest" has a
> session running.

I don't think that will be needed. GDM already gives us the list of all
the users, so we should be able to work from that. Thanks for the offer
though!

I integrated a patch from ~ion to fix this issue. The updated package
is fast-user-switch-applet_2.24.0-0ubuntu5 which is available in my PPA:

http://launchpad.net/~ted-gould/+archive

Attached is a debdiff of the change and the changelog is below:

fast-user-switch-applet (2.24.0-0ubuntu5) intrepid; urgency=low

  * 82_gdm_guest_session.patch: Update by ion to make it so that the
    Guest session menu item hides if there is already a guest logged
    into the system. Fixes LP: #281971
  * 91_ltsp_new_features.patch: Update for changes to 82 above.

 -- Ted Gould <email address hidden> Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:40:12 -0500

The differences can be most easily seen using Bazaar:

bzr diff -r 475..477 lp:~ted-gould/fast-user-switch-applet/guest_account

This bug was fixed in the package fast-user-switch-applet - 2.24.0-0ubuntu5

---------------
fast-user-switch-applet (2.24.0-0ubuntu5) intrepid; urgency=low

  * 82_gdm_guest_session.patch: Update by ion to make it so that the
    Guest session menu item hides if there is already a guest logged
    into the system. Fixes LP: #281971
  * 91_ltsp_new_features.patch: Update for changes to 82 above.

 -- Ted Gould <email address hidden> Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:40:12 -0500

This isn’t entirely fixed yet: after starting a guest session and then logging out of it, f-u-s-a doesn’t realize the guest account has been deleted, and displays “Guest” for logging in as guest as well as “Guest session” because there’s no active guest session.

F-u-s-a should be modified to notice the deletion of the guest account.

I notice that this bug has been marked fixed but later set to confirmed. Could you please open a new bug for the issue after the fix of this one? Thanks