Guest login not available with hide-users

[Dominik George]

In the LightDM GTK+ Greeter 1.8.5, there is no option to start a guest session if the user list is hidden. It can only be selected when hide-users is set to false.

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

I looked at the code and found a workaround. The guest entry in the user dropdown injects the string "*guest" into the username for authentication.

Entering *guest as username does the trick. I think that this is also a bug - the codeflow can be changed with special values entered into the username field - but it gives a running guest session ;).

(Hint: You can also enter *other to trigger the code normally run by the "Other ..." entry in the user combo, which changes the display state of the username field.)

[Andrew P. (kalgasnik)]

Let's call this bug "a feature" and document it.
Except of its "*other" part - it must be fixed.

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

For future consideration, maybe we can add a button to the bottom left for "Guest Login"?

[Andrew P. (kalgasnik)]

Just for hide-users mode. I think it is better to add special column to "users" model - TYPE - to prevent things like this.

[Andrew P. (kalgasnik)]

Last line in my message disappeared.
And use this type in all functions with "username" argument. There are 2 or 3 such functions that really need it.