[Kde-kiosk] How to remove certain menues from KDE

[Ask Holme]

Damir Dezeljin <programing at mbss.org> wrote:
> I encountered few problems:
> - I can't remove the 'System Settings' and 'Preferences' menu from start
>   menu in my FC 2 installation;
> - I was unable to lock down (remove items from) start menuglobaly. For
>   this reason I had to use menu editor from the target user and later
>   change permision of ~user/.config directory so that it is writable only
>   by root.
> 
> Any sugestion how to solve above issues?
The KDE menu system ain't targeted by the kiosk framework. The menu
system works via XML files written in a freedesktop format (i don't got
a link to the specification right here). The idea is that you got a
global file in KDEDIR/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu which is then
merged with the users local file.  So if you want to lockdown the menu,
you need to edit the applications.menu file by hand. 
I did it, and hit my head against the wall a couple of times. 
First off you need to know that kde uses the applications.menu file for
more than the K-menu. as an example the control panel is using the file,
so simply writing a file with the items you want is not going to work. 
Instead remove menus using the "<deleted/>" tag. inside <menu></menu>
then use exclude etc. to avoid that the items you need  is hitted by the
delete tag. It's not a 5-minuts job, but it will work. A nice thing is
that kicker rereads the file on-the-fly so you want need to restart kde
all the time, just open the kde-menu a couple of times.  

> How can I logout an local loged in X user from an SSH session on the
> machine (so from another machine)?
Well i usually do it the ugly way, simply kill all processes belonging
to the user. 
--
Ask Holme
  "<+lisa`> well, sometimes, when the moon is right i like to print out 
   the source code to the Linux kernel, scatter them on the floor, lube
   myself up and roll around in the printed code."