After skipping 3 entire releases, and 18 months later, here we are, finally: GDM 2.30 is entering unstable.

How can you be so late?

For those who haven’t followed and just wondered why Debian is so late this is lame this sucks Ubuntu is better because they have the latest version and Fedora is even better because they even have versions that don’t work at all, here is the short story: the GDM rewrite wasn’t really usable until 2.28 (which is the version with which Ubuntu started to ship it, incidentally). Add to that the time to make a transition plan and to integrate it properly, and that makes actually only 6 months.

Big thanks go to Luca Bruno (Lethalman) who did most of the job. A quick look at the changelog will give you an idea of the amount of work involved to bring it to our quality standards.

GDM 2.20 and 2.30

Since the rewrite has absolutely zero compatibility with previous versions, it will not be upgraded in place. Therefore, while newly installed systems will get GDM 2.30 by default for squeeze, those upgrading from lenny will keep GDM 2.20. The 2.20 version will be dropped after the squeeze release.

If you want to upgrade your GDM, simply run apt-get install gdm3 . It should work for simple setups, and there’s a hack that makes upgrades work even when logged on X.

Everyone who has needs for advanced features (such as LTSP people) should make sure GDM 2.30 suits their needs during the squeeze cycle, since the old version will not be here anymore after.

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