[Kde-kiosk] Classroom control

[Waldo Bastian]

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 20:56, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
> I am trying to establish a controllable KDE desktop for the classroom
> (all KDE apart from a couple of BBCs and one Archimedes) you can see at
>
>   http://www.felsted.essex.sch.uk/~camera
>
> and need some advice. My idea is to set up a user "kdelock1" the way I
> want then ensure that other specified machines or users (at controllable
> times) pick up this configuration. The best way to do this, I think, is to
> insert softlinks in user directories from Xsession during startup,
> softlinks from the user's .kde and wherever else is necessary ("Desktop"?)
> to the equivalent files in ~kdelock1.
>
> The Xsession and lock_active system works fine. It's described in
>
>    http://www.felsted.essex.sch.uk/ict/kdelock.html

Assuming that you use KDE3 you might get better results by using $KDEDIRS and 
the config lockdown features.

E.g. set $KDEDIRS for your students to $KDEDIR:/home/kdelock1/.kde/
now they will pick up default settings from the kdelock1 user but will still 
be able to make changes to them and konqueror will still be able to save
bookmarks etc.

If there are configuration items that shouldn't be changed by your students 
you can add [$i] on top of the corresponding config files in 
/home/kdelock1/.kde/share/config which will make these settings immutable: 
Any setting that is set in the config file with the same name under 
$HOME/.kde/share/config will then be ignored.

See also
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdelibs/kdecore/README.kiosk?rev=1.4.2.2&content-type=text/plain

In KDE 3.1 things have been extended a bit, see
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdelibs/kdecore/README.kiosk?rev=1.18.2.3&content-type=text/plain

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian@kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian@suse.com