Re: Locking down the gnome desktop

[Joerg Barfurth <Joerg Barfurth Sun COM>]

Alex Howe schrieb:

> I am trying to lock down my ubuntu 7.10 LTSP server for non admin users. 
> I have trailed through the forums to find answers but still no joy.

> I want to be able to do the following:
>
> - lock down the desktop to stop users from changing the background image.
> - lock down the menus so they can't be edited.
> - lock down all of the panels
>
> The best solution for this would be to disable the right click function 
> on the desktop and panels a bit like how the kde kiosk tool works.

There should be gconf keys to achieve most of what you want..

> I tried the following things:
>
> Pessulus - Only allows locking of the panels.
> Sayabon profile editor - Crashes so much that it's unusable.

You could also look at Apoc <http://apoc.freedesktop.org/wiki/Apoc>. It 
provides live administration of default and mandatory settings, possibly 
via a central server. It plugs into gconf as a backend. Alas, there 
aren't binary release yet and I don't know if anyone has used it on 
Ubuntu yet.

> Most of the posts and info I have read reference the gconf-editor. Is 
> there any way to achieve this?

Lockdown settings really belong into the mandatory gconf settings, but 
gconf-editor edits settings for the current user. There are several ways 
to bridge this gap:

- Sabayon is really intended to do that for you, if you use gconf-editor 
in a Sabayon-managed session.

- You can do essentially what sabayon would do yourself: Run a session 
under a test account. Make settings in gconf-editor. Use gconftool-2 
--dump to dump the settings to a file. Use gconftool-2 --direct 
--config-source <...> --load <file> to load the file into the mandatory 
settings.

- Jörg


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Joerg Barfurth           phone: +49 40 23646662 / x66662
Software Engineer        mailto:joerg barfurth sun com
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