[Konsole-devel] Re: Konsole Question

[Waldo Bastian]

On Wednesday 05 March 2003 15:46, Dave Richards wrote:
> Hello-
> 	We are a large KDE shop and I am looking at using Konsole to deploy our
> character based applications for the whole city.
>
> There are some deployment issues, and I wanted to share them with you.
>
> Konsole is a *great* program, but is designed for the end user to have a
> lot of control over their session--which in our environment would be
> very bad.  The users have no clue what emulation to pick, how many
> columns and rows they need.
>
> What would really help is some command line arguments that would take
> configure certain items, and then disable them from the pulldowns along
> the top.
>
> For instance, if the command --noscrollbar was issued, it would turn off
> the scroll bar and then now allow them to turn it back on again via the
> pulldowns.
>
> The more things that I could configure via the command line, the better.

A lot of this can already be disabled with KDE's KIOSK framework. By adding a 
[KDE Action Restrictions] group to your konsolerc file, you can disable 
individual actions. The following actions are used in konsole:

action/copy
action/paste
action/clear_terminal
action/reset_clear_terminal
action/find_history
action/find_next
action/find_previous
action/save_history
action/clear_history
action/clear_all_histories
action/detach_session
action/rename_session
action/monitor_activity
action/monitor_silence
action/send_input_to_all_sessions
action/show_menubar
action/show_toolbar
action/fullscreen
action/save_sessions_profile
action/close_session
action/quit
action/new_session
action/activate_menu
action/list_sessions

So if you don't want the user to toggle his menubar, you would add:

[KDE Action Restrictions]
action/show_menubar=false

I notice that this doesn't include a way to disable toggling of the scrollbar, 
probably because sub-menus are handled slightly different. I will see if I 
can add that for KDE 3.1.1

Also usefull in this context is:

[KDE Action Restrictions]
shell_access=false

This disables all actions that start a new shell in konsole (such as 
action/new_session, but more complete) You do need KDE 3.1.x for this.

Note that if you change this in konsolerc it will apply to all konsoles. 
However you can copy konsolerc to e.g. my_konsolerc and then start konsole 
with "konsole --config my_konsolerc"

Let me know if the above would work for you and if you have anything in 
particular that you would like to see restricted/disabled.

> The other even bigger issue is printing.  Our current character
> emulation software allows you to print right from the software itself.
> You can select a printer, you can do a screen dump of the entire screen,
> and you can also do a screen dump of just the highlighted text.  This is
> used *all* the time in software applications that are in use.  The users
> would not have the skillset or understanding to copy and paste the text
> to another application.

Ah yes, there has been more demand for that, see e.g. 
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55109 I will see what I can do.

> I just wanted to shoot you these issues, and let you know what things
> would be used in Enterprise type rollouts of Konsole.

Your feedback is very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com