Constantly resizing GDM login box is disconcerting

Bug #430207 reported by Paul Sladen
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gdm (Ubuntu)
New
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: gdm

In the GDM and its theme used in the 9.10 alpha 5, the login box resizes its approximately four times during normal login.

This is disconcerting for the user as the boxes inside it become a "moving target", in addition the excessive resizing looks unprofessional.

Ideally, GDM should decided on a dialogue box size and *stick with it* for the duration; or change size a maximum of once at the point that no further user input is required.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thank you for your bug report could you report the different changes you see? xsplash should be used until the login screen is displayed, the box change once when selecting an user and then xsplash starts again there...

Changed in gdm (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote :

This relates only to the GDM login window:

 1. The window appears showing just the icon, hostname and two buttons
 2. The window is dynamically filled with the two users on the machine
 3. (After clicking a user) the window is shrink back to the initial empty size
 4. Immediately the window is re-expanded when the password box is displayed

The window displays four different window heights, "sliding" between each of them.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

not confirming the issue there, when xsplash transition to gdm the user list is already built

Changed in gdm (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → New
Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote :

seb128: not on this machine...

Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote :

The attached image 'gdm-bouncing-castle.png' shows half-a-dozen different sizes of the GDM login box during a <10 second period of time.

The was generated from doing:

 * $ while true ; do DISPLAY=:3 sudo recordmydesktop ; done
 * New Session... login
 * Playing the ogv at 1/10 speed in vlc and taking screenshots
 * cropping with mogrify -crop 368x500+456+189
 * manually combining side-by-side in Gimp

The randomness is an artifact of the GDM login and _not_ of the video recording or screenshoting.

The problem appears to be repeated dynamic updates of the login window without disabling the dynamic relayout during the update. (Not wrapped with gtk_container_disable_resize() and gtk_container_enable_resize() (?)).

However container re-layout is not the whole issue as---seen from the first capture on the left---the dialogue first appears with all buttons greyed out as disabled and no users in the list.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

do you have xsplash installed? is it showed at all on your config?

Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote :

Assuming that 'xsplash' is the thing with the jumpy vertical white-bar animation with one-too-many-frames; this displays for ~5 seconds before GDM and then ~15 seconds afterwards.

Attached video shows login up to the point where something crashes (if it not being recorded, xsplash would be resumed and then the Desktop would eventually re-appear).

Core2 Duo, 2x 2.00GHz, + 2GB RAM so is unlikely to be resource starvation.

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