Consider simpler version of login-userlist-disable.page on Ubuntu

[Fábio Lima]

This how-to does not work on artful and bionic:
https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/login-userlist-disable.html.en

GDM will always show the users list - even those logged remotely.
There were a similar key for lightdm/unity that did work good.
Version in use: gdm3 3.27.92-0ubuntu1

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I am reassigning this to gnome-user-docs. The documentation may need to be customized a bit for Ubuntu here.

The system-admin-guide is installed by default currently. You can run this command to view it. (It should be more user accessible but that's a different bug…)

yelp help:system-help

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

The documentation is equal to the online one.
Does it mean It needs a correction with new procedures?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Jeremy: Do you know offhand what the behavior in Ubuntu is supposed to be? Is it changed via patches in gdm3 and/or accountsservice?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Maybe all you need to do is uncomment the disable-user-list line in
/usr/share/gdm/greeter.dconf-defaults

and restart your computer.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks, worth testing. But OTOH I'm disinclined to advise users in the official docs to edit a package owned file in /usr/share. There ought to be a better way.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Oops. Try /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults instead

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

And I think you need to uncomment the [org/gnome/login-screen] line too.

(I haven't tried this stuff.)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2018-03-29 17:51, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> (I haven't tried this stuff.)

Me neither. May do it later.

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

That's It!
I've tested a iso image generated early today and edited /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults.
Thanks!

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Editing /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults, as Jeremy suggested, works for me too. However, also the instruction in system-admin-guide works fine for me, so making an Ubuntu specific variant of that page seems not to be motivated. Possibly there is room for improvements of the upstream page.

@Fábio: Before suggesting anything, it would be valuable to know why it failed for you. For instance, did you successfully create the dconf database? For me it looks like this:

$ ls -l /etc/dconf/db/gdm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 240 mar 29 23:45 /etc/dconf/db/gdm

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

I followed straightly all the steps (https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/login-userlist-disable.html.en). A database similar to yours was created at /etc/dconf/db/gdm.

The first time I edited /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults It did not work. Then I undone what I have done before: Deleted /etc/dconf/profile/gdm, /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/00-login-screen, /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/, /etc/dconf/db/gdm and then I've run "dconf update" again. All of that leaving the file /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults as suggested. This time It worked fine.
Lastly I've made a clean OS reinstall using today's daily-live bionic iso and only edited /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults as suggested. It worked fine.

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

If any of you think it valuable, I can make new tests.

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

Hmmm.... Now I've just made a new clean OS reinstall. Installed all apt updates available right now (including dconf-cli_0.26.0-2ubuntu3, dconf-gsettings-backend_0.26.0-2ubuntu3 and dconf-service_0.26.0-2ubuntu3).
Followed straightly gnome's webpage instructions. It worked as expected! Then edited /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults as Jeremy suggested - and It worked. And lastly undone first steps and left only /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults edited. And It also worked.
For me It seems that, in current start, both procedures works as expected.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thank you, Fábio!

My guess is that you made some typo the first time, which speaks for the documented way being error prone. So with this information, I'm thinking of asking the GNOME help developers to consider to replace it with showing how to edit /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults. The latter way is apparently easier and, probably, safer.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Gunnar, I think /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults might be unique to Debian and Ubuntu.

[Fábio Lima (fhl)]

Yeah, I may have made a mistake. I've made many tryes before. And It only worked when I've undone all the procedures.
I guess editing greeter.dconf-defaults is much better too. It's safier and easier to make automated config across many installations.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for the heads up, Jeremy. I think so too when looking at the code; no reason to bother upstream.