[Kde-kiosk] Replicating Firefox/OpenOffice

[Christopher Dawkins]

I am having problems having replaced an older KDE installation with KDE
3.4. Discless terminals (FreeBSD), school environment.

I have a working "master user" ~kdelock1, and in my Xsession have $KDEDIRS
set to ~kdelock1/.kde. It does not seem to make much difference, except to
the speed, whether I have just this one entry in $KDEDIRS or whether I add
the central share (which is /usr/local/share on a FreeBSD system), i.e.
whether

     KDEDIRS=/home/misc/kdelock1/.kde/
 or  KDEDIRS=/home/misc/kdelock1/.kde/:/usr/local/

However, currently (with the top line) users do inherit the settings from
kdelock1, which is comforting.

The first problem is that it is all very much slower than it used to be.

The next problem is how to ensure users inherit the Firefox proxy and home
page settings from the master user, ~kdelock1. I tried this in Xsession:

    if [ ! -e ${HOME}/.mozilla ] ; then
              cp -Rp /home/misc/kdelock1/.mozilla ${HOME}/
              chown -R ${USER} ${HOME}/.mozilla
    fi

which works, in that if the user has no .mozilla entry it copies the one
from my master user, "kdelock1". But when KDE starts up it appears to
wipe the critical parts (particularly the subdirectory containing the
prefs.js) from the user's new .mozilla.

The user I am testing is freshly created so has no existing kdeglobals or
other rc files - all should be inherited from ~kdelock1.

So - how do I link the firefox settings for all users to a central
configuration?



The next problem will be to do this for Openoffice 1.1.4 so users don't
have to do their own setup, although this is more straightforward than
getting them to configure their own Firefox.



-- 
Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex  CM6 3JG
01371-822698, mobile 07816 821659    cchd at felsted.essex.sch.uk