GDM doesn’t pick up my face when home is encrypted

[Andrey Sitnik]

Binary package hint: gdm

I encrypt my home dir by ecryptfs on installation (by user-setup/encrypt-home=true). I set my face, but GDM doesn’t show it. When my account is used GDM show face.
I try to:
* use GlobalFaceDir and put file like user.png in it dir;
* put .face file in user dir (when account isn’t active and user dir contain only README to decrypt);
but it didn’t help.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

This is a "can't fix" from the ecryptfs perspective. If you face image is stored in your encrypted home directory, you can't read this data until you've entered your password. This is by design.

GDM could perhaps store your picture some place other than your home directory (like i /var/lib perhaps). However, I suspect others would fairly complain that private data (their image) is being leaked to non-encrypted storage.

Now, if you really want to work around this issue you could:
 1) copy your non-encrypted image to some non-encrypted location, like /var/lib
 2) create a symlink in your non-encrypted home directory to the non-encrypted image.

:-Dustin

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

upstream wishlist, gdm could use a system directory user writable to store those