Login screen face browser should respond to keyboard as well as a mouse click

[Jane Silber]

Binary package hint: gdm

(Karmic Beta) The face browser requires you to mouse click on the person you want to login as. It should also allow you to proceed by pressing <enter> when the desired person is highlighted (i.e, not require the mouse).

[Richard Hansen (rhansen)]

I used to be able to hit enter to select a user, but now I have to click with the mouse. There's apparently no way to log in if you don't have a mouse.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

using enter on the login screen works just fine there, do you want to select the default user? what happens when you use enter?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The behaviour started recently but gdm didn't change which is weird

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I get this as well. Indeed it's intended to be able to just press enter, or typeahead your user name, but it recently broke.

It seems to correlate with bug 439138; in the situations where gdm is misbehaving, I also get the "X uses 100% CPU" bug. After restarting X, it seems to work again.

It is conceivable that both bugs have the same source: X desperately trying to claim the VT, which cryptsetup also holds, and there's a conflict with both things wanting to grab the keyboard/console.

Can anyone confirm this? Please add the system monitor applet for watching the CPU usage. When you get the bug, do you get a constant 100% CPU usage? If you log out and back in, is it fixed, and does gdm react to just pressing enter for the user name?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

On a clean Karmic installation, I experience the GDM problem but do not experience bug 439138.

[Jim Kirkpatrick (jim-kirkpatrick)]

I do not get the 100% CPU bug, just no keyboard response until I click the name. Was fine, now broken since recent updates (within 4 days).

Using Nvidia non-free, AMD64, Logitech USB wireless mouse/keyboard.

[Jane Silber (silbs)]

I reported the bug originally, but haven't been able to reproduce it
since this morning's updates (12 Oct). Of course those updates may be
unrelated - will let you know if I experience it again. It sounds like
others are still seeing it though, at least intermittently.

[Alexey Kotlyarov (koterpillar)]

This always happens on my system with only one user; however, does not happen on another with multiple users.

[Alexey Kotlyarov (koterpillar)]

No, it happens on both machines.

[Dave Stroud (bigdavesr)]

this affects me also. But on auto log in it should not show up when booting. It never did before any way.It is also extremely hard to read. Its way too dark.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

This effecting me on my netbook (running UNR) but on my desktop.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

Robert, could you please take a look and see if any GDM changes may have triggered this?

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

I think this has nothing to do with #439138. The login face browser list simply does not have input focus. I can click around and nothing changes unless I click in the list and it gets focus.

The input focus is lost again if I click on the Accessibility icon and then dismiss its dialog with the top-right cross.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

If there is no work around for this, this effectively blocks some users from being able to log into Karmic. Note that some users do not have the capability of using a mouse due to circumstances such as physical disabilities.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

Providing some info for robert_ancell at his request:
1. reboot -> no focus
2. use session menu to "switch user" -> no focus
3. switch to VT 9 -> focus
4. switch back to VT 7, use session menu to "switch user" -> focus

[Christopher Peplin (chris.peplin)]

I can confirm it looks to just be a focus issue - if you press control+alt+tab you can alternate between the login window and the panel and effectively login without a mouse again.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

Note that removing xsplash allows the GDM greeter to have focus on start up ... this is a sufficient work around to ship, in my opinion ... though it's still an annoying bug that should be fixed or at least worked around.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

You can also loose focus by opening the accessibility dialog and closing it - nothing has focus after this

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Fixed, the cause was the login window had the DOCK hint which was stopping metacity from giving it focus.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Looks good, but fails to build on karmic amd64 here.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gdm - 2.28.0-0ubuntu15

---------------
gdm (2.28.0-0ubuntu15) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/23_login_window_hint.patch:
    - Don't put a type hint on the login window as this causes it not to get
      focus (LP: #447049)
  * debian/patches/16_gdmserver_user_manager.patch:
    - Don't show users with UID < 1000 (LP: #427462)

 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:56:41 +1100