[Kde-kiosk] A nice uniform desktop for all users...

[Martijn Klingens]

On Tuesday 14 September 2004 22:44, Verner Kjærsgaard wrote:
> As I understand it, this is what I should do:
>
> a) create a brand new user, lets call him MasterUser.
> b) modify his desktop to look the preferred way. No mouse theme and so.
> c) Copy this desktop (what files?) to a place (skeleton..??) from where
> they would act as the standard template for the users to come.
> d)Use kiosktool to setup some simple rules. They would go
> into /etc/kde-profile/profile1/share/config....from where they should be
> copied to where?
> e) Edit the /opt/kde/bin/startkde file (As I'm using SuSE9.1/KDE3.2.1). At
> the end of that file I would add:
>
> "export KDEDIRS=$(kiosktool-kdedirs)"
>
> Create a ton of new users, all with usernames and passwords.
> All the users are kids and teachers at our 100% linux equipped school. At
> some point in the future it would be nice to be able to group users into
> categories, so the teachers would get the simple desktops and the kids the
> fancy ones :-) But for now, the above mentioned will do very fine.
>
> Of course, I've got too many questions and too few talents. Anyway, any
> (however brief and short) help is appreciated. And I apologize for the long
> posting.

What you're describing is the "original" way of doing things using $KDEDIRS. 
However, Kiosk has gotten even more powerful through the use of user 
profiles. They require less setup and are harder to circumvent through users 
modifying $KDEDIRS.

The new way of doing things is:

1. Log on as yourself
2. Start kiosktool
3. Create a new profile, click Setup if you like and click Next when done
4. In the main screen setup both the preferences and the required lockdown 
settings as you want them
5. Click Manage Users to link users to profiles

That's it! Kiosktool copies the files to the required locations, you can 
conveniently use your own account for setting up and locking down and when 
done it just 'works'.

If you need customizations that are not covered by kiosktool you may need to 
create a test account and copy over the customized config files to the 
profile dir that Kiosktool sets up. You then also need to manually lock the 
files using $i flags. For many cases kiosktool is the tool of choice though.

Good luck!

Martijn