Re: Adding icons to the desktop, without placing them in ~/Desktop.

[Erik Forsberg <forsberg+gnome-desktop-devel cendio se>]

Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 16:10 +0100, Erik Forsberg wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to add icons to the desktop of users, without copying
> > .desktop-files to ~/Desktop of the user. I need to do it while
> > running as the user, and the icons can be different for every user, so
> > system-wide directories are not an option. Well, they could be, if
> > there is a way to configure which system-wide directories to look in. 
> > 
> > KDE has a way to do this, you can copy .desktop-files into
> > ~/.kde/share/apps/kdesktop/Desktop, where they are harder to find "by
> > mistake" for the user. 
> > 
> > Is this possible in Gnome?
> 
> We don't have anything like that, and it would be very useful.
> 
> Grabbing desktop items from a system-wide directory would be useful for
> sysadmins.

OK. Do you want me to add bugs for this in the Gnome bugzilla, or are
there already entries covering this? 

> What are you trying to do that needs user-specific items?

In the product my company is developing, ThinLinc, we have a
Webmin-based administrative tool for administrating desktops, called
the "ThinLinc Desktop Customizer". It has functionality for
configuring the menu and desktop icons for users, based on their
username, group or "ThinLinc profile".

This is heavily used by schools for creating desktops based on for
example which classes a student is attending, which year he started,
etc. 

Until now, the TLDC has only supported KDE. We're now looking into
supporting Gnome as well, which seems to be quite easy since we use
the XDG Menu standard. Unfortunately, the desktop icon functionality
will have to be implemented in a less beautiful way, probably by
creating symlinks in the ~/Desktop directory.

Cheers,
\EF
-- 
Erik Forsberg                OpenSource-based Thin Client Technology
Cendio AB                    Phone: +46-13-21 46 00