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https://github.com/gnome/gnome-initial-setup

Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup
https://github.com/gnome/gnome-initial-setup

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Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup

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README 

        
GNOME Initial Setup

===================



After acquiring or installing a new system there are a few essential things

to set up before use. Initial Setup aims to provide a simple, easy, and safe way

to prepare a new system. This should only include a few essential steps for

which we can't provide good defaults. The desired experience is that the system

boots straight into Initial Setup, and when the setup tasks are completed, we

smoothly transition into the user session for the newly-created user account.



There are two modes.



New User Mode

-------------



When there are no existing user accounts on the system, gdm launches Initial

Setup in a special initial setup session that runs GNOME Shell with a somewhat

reduced UI, similar to the way it is used on the login screen. In this mode,

Initial Setup will create a new user account. By default, all pages except

Welcome are displayed:



 * Language

 * Keyboard

 * Network

 * Privacy

 * Timezone

 * Software (currently only used by Fedora)

 * Account

 * Password

 * Parental Controls (if malcontent is enabled)

 * Parent Password (if malcontent is enabled)

 * Summary



There are some deficiencies with this mode. First, some pages are redundant

with distro installers. Linux distros do not want to prompt the user to

configure the same thing multiple times. Distros have to suppress particular

pages using the vendor.conf file (discussed below). For example, Fedora's

vendor.conf suppresses the Language and Keyboard pages when in new user mode,

and suppresses the Timezone page always, to avoid redundancy with its Anaconda

installer. The Welcome page is displayed whenever the Language page is

suppressed via vendor.conf. Second, the new user mode will be used for both

regular and OEM installs, because there is no separate OEM mode. When pages are

suppressed to avoid redundancy with distro installers, OEM installs suffer

because there users never run the installer and therefore never receive the

suppressed pages. In the future, we should create a separate OEM mode to fix

this.



Existing User Mode

------------------



Initial Setup has code to support running when logging into a new user account

for the first time. Confusingly, this is called existing user mode, but it

makes sense if you think "the user already exists and Initial Setup does not

need to create it." Although the code exists, it is actually impossible to ever

access existing user mode as of Initial Setup 40. This mode was entirely

disabled in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/merge_requests/113

to avoid conflicting with GNOME Tour. It would be nice to bring it back, but to

do so, we would want to fix https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/12.

Historically, existing user mode runs in the normal user account session, but we

really need it to run in the same special initial setup session that is used for

new user mode. Otherwise, the Language page does not actually work; the locale

has to be set before launching the normal user session, and cannot be changed

once the session has started. Since the code still exists, it is worth

documenting here even though it is currently unreachable.



When running in existing user mode, the Timezone, Software, Account, Password,

Parental Controls, and Parent Password pages are all disabled because they do not

make sense in this mode. This results in the following workflow:



 * Language

 * Keyboard

 * Network

 * Privacy

 * Summary



Although this mode is unreachable in the upstream version of Initial Setup, both

Debian and Ubuntu have downstream patches to restore it.



Vendor Configuration

--------------------



Some aspects of Initial Setup's behaviour can be overridden through a

_vendor configuration file_.



By default, Initial Setup will try to read configuration from

`$(sysconfdir)/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf` (i.e.

`/etc/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf` in a typical installation). If this file

does not exist or cannot be read, Initial Setup will read

`$(datadir)/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf` (i.e.

`/usr/share/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf`). The intention is that

distributions will provide their configuration (if any) in the latter file,

with the former used by administrators or hardware vendors to override the

distribution's configuration.



For backwards-compatibility, a `vendor-conf-file` option can be passed to

`meson configure`. If specified, Initial Setup will *only* try to read

configuration from that path; neither of the default paths will be checked.



Here's a (contrived) example of what can be controlled using this file:



```ini

[pages]

# Never show the timezone page

skip=timezone

# Don't show the language and keyboard pages in the 'first boot' situation,

# only when running for an existing user

existing_user_only=language;keyboard

# Only show the privacy page in the 'first boot' situation

new_user_only=privacy

```



License

-------



GNOME Initial Setup is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License,

version 2 or later. See the [COPYING](COPYING) file for details.