[Kde-kiosk] Kiosk problem

[Martijn Klingens]

On Saturday 14 May 2005 02:24, Daniel Villavicencio wrote:
> Hi everyone, i want to use kiosk for making something similar you can do
> with windows active directory but when i try to save any changes to the
> profile i get a message error telling me that the
> user at localhost\etc\kde-profile folder couldn't be created, what must i do??

Did you use backslashes somewhere or are you just using them out of habit? 
Unix uses forward slashes ('/') like URLs, not the backslashes that Dos and 
Windows use.

Apart from that, did you enter the correct password for the 'root' user? 
Although you start kiosktool as a normal (unprivileged) user, you need the 
root password to be able to write to /etc.

Third, did the error really say 'user'? Or did you replace 'root' with it? It 
should say 'root' there, since that's the user who can write to /etc.

Fourth, what KDE version and KioskTool version are you using?

Last, please note that Windows Group Policy and KDE Kiosk Profiles are not 
entirely comparable. I plan to write a comparison on the two one day, but due 
to lack of time that might very well take another year or so before I get to 
it. In short some notable differences:

* Windows is administered centrally through AD. KDE requires Kiosk being set 
up on individual workstations, although of course you can synchronize the 
profiles from a central location. I don't know if using an LDAP server can 
bring KDE up to par here, but as far as I know Kiosk doesn't have enough 
support for LDAP to be a real replacement in large enterprise rollouts up to 
the point where profiles are automatically loaded based on LDAP settings.

* KDE supports 'default' settings next to 'locked down' settings, whereas 
Windows doesn't really have the notion of setting defaults that a user can 
still override if he or she likes to. There is the concept of a default user 
profile in Windows, but that is much trickier to use, and doesn't allow 
changing the defaults for existing users (that didn't customize the 
particular settings yet).

* Windows allows the Administrator to grant fine-grained control over the 
directory (and hence the group policies contained in it) to other people, and 
even without using delegation of control you can make other people member of 
the Domain Admins group to give them full reign over the AD and hence the 
policies. In KDE only root ultimately has write access to the profile and 
only a single user is allowed to start KioskTool, bypassing existing profiles 
once they are in place.

* KDE supports expansion of variables and the output of shell commands in most 
settings. This is extremely useful if the setting you want to supply is not 
constant, but can be retrieved from the environment or generated by a script. 
Windows has only limited support for environment variable expansion and no 
support for scripts to set defaults.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Martijn