[Kde-kiosk] how to make KDE kiosk work

[Martijn Klingens]

On Monday 10 January 2005 13:50, Claudio Henrique Fortes Felix wrote:
> That explains a lot :) Since you guys are more into it than the docs -
> it appears there´s really work in progress right now - what can I, at
> this point, make just through the "kiosktool"? Is there stuff I still
> can´t achieve through it, having to edit the profile files manually
> instead?

Oh yes, there's plenty of that. You can configure a *LOT* of things in KDE 
that are not achievable through KioskTool yet.

Most notably preconfiguring a desktop with your own settings can technically 
be done for almost any KDE application and component around[1], but KioskTool 
has only special modules for the most common cases.

Second, KioskTool only adds the [$i] immutable modifier to the relevant 
configuration sections, but support for $e to expand environment variables or 
the output of shell commands is not available through KioskTool. You'll need 
to manually edit your configuration files for that.

Last, locking down settings rather than merely preconfiguring them is also 
only partly available through KioskTool. Note that there are far more bugs in 
this area than the ones that I mentioned under [1] below; if you use less 
common applications and lock down stuff that's not covered by KioskTool you 
will inevitably find settings that don't properly lock down.

If you're lucky it's "just" a setting that can be changed during runtime but 
never gets written to disk because the generic Kiosk support in kdelibs 
prevents it. In worse cases you can't even avoid stuff from getting changed 
on disk or you get application crashes.

In either case, please report the issues to the respective application 
authors. With Kiosk getting more mature and more well-known more people are 
adjusting their applications to support it, but only *very* few developers 
actually do this on their own -- real-life use cases are needed or nobody 
will be even aware that a problem exists.

> In my case, particularly, I need to lock some application settings like
> the sound server used by arts (ESD), and maybe the visual settings, for
> making sure the users don´t come later saying the sound stopped working,
> or the program that was there is not anymore, u know... I´m already
> taking a look at kiosktool, for I guess it´s supposed to do those
> things, but is it possible to say wether it´s actually "enough" without
> tweaking the profiles? By the way, if I do have to tweak, let´s say,
> specific application settings to lock them down, do I have to edit the
> config files on /opt/kde/share or somewhere else?

The current way to lock down a desktop is roughly this:

1. Setup basic profiles using kiosktool to do the grunt work. Lock down 
whatever is easily possible through kiosktool
2. Log on as a test user with the profile created by kiosktool applied
3. Define any configuration settings that you want
4. Manually merge those settings into the profile created by KioskTool and 
apply the $i and $e flags where needed
5. Clean the test user's settings or use a second test user and repeat steps 
3-5 until it all works.

Still rather laborious, but it's getting better with every kiosktool release, 
and I think it's at least enough for now.

Martijn

[1] Some applications store their data in a non-standard way that is not
    compatible with predefining settings. Sometimes it's inevitable due to the
    way an application works, but more often it's just a bug that the authors
    are not aware of. (On a single desktop you won't notice the problem. :)
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