Configuring new user's gnome setup

["David G. Wonnacott" <davew-gnome triluminary cs haverford edu>]

We'll be using Gnome in a new introductory CS lab, and we'll need to
be able to set up Gnome for a significant number of new accounts.
We're using RedHat Linux 6.0, and Gnome is started by default, but we
need to configure a few special options for our lab -- mainly adding
some new Mime Types and some panel buttons, and turning off the prompt
when logging out.

My question -- how can an administrator control the initial panel and
Mime Types that are installed when a user first runs gnome?  These are
kept in the .gnome directory, as far as I can tell, but this directory
contains files with absolute pathnames in them, so I can't just make
copies of a master account that I've set up.  I could copy files
selectively after letting the user start gnome once, but I don't like
this solution for a number of reasons (its less convenient, and I
worry that I may only get a subset of the files that appear to work at
first but leave some inconsistency that will be a problem later,
etc.).

Please let me know if there is a way to accomplish this.  I looked at
the Gnome documents, hunted around the file system for a template for
gnome installation, and did some searches of this mailing list's FAQ
and archive, but so far without success.  I apologize if I overlooked
an existing answer to this question.

Dave Wonnacott
davew@cs.haverford.edu