Re: GNOME Administration

[Carl Riches <riches ms washington edu>]

On Tue, 2 May 2000, Paul Cooper wrote:

> Carl Riches <riches@ms.washington.edu> writes:> We run a bunch of different kinds of Unix systems, including RedHat
> > I have been unable to figure out what files GNOME uses to configure itself,
> > and may not be looking in the correct locations for the config files.
> > Perhaps I'm seeing the files but not understanding how they work.  Can
> > someone help me out with this information?
> > 
> 
> That someone is me ;-) The doc is pretty minimal but I was hoping for more (or
> in fact some) additions from folks out there ;-/ Something high on the todo
> list is to go through the .gnome dir config files and sort them out. 
> 
> Please send me and or the list any specific questions you have so I can start
> an faq - we will all do our best to answer them.

For example, how does one construct a GNOME menu?  What file(s) are
involved for both system-wide and personal menus?  Are these plain-text
files?  Can they be edited with a text editor?

> > Someone started a document here:
> >  http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~pgc/gnome/
> 
> I've changed jobs and that page won't last much longer - try
> http://www.darboux.uklinux.net/gnome/
> 

I've looked at this a few times, but it doesn't tell me what I need to
know.  It is a nice start on a how-to cookbook, but it doesn't say what
file(s) get changed at each step.  In addition, the part about removing
the system menu doesn't work on my installations of RH 6.1/GNOME.  I tried
adding the "SystemMenu=" line in various places to the file:
  /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
and setting the value to 0 (zero), to no avail.  A user still sees the
options of "Halt" and "Reboot" on the GNOME logout popup menu.  I'd like
to know in what file this menu is defined so that I can change the
definition.

In general I need to know what files GNOME uses for configuration and
where they are supposed to exist, in order to create the same sort of
customized local configuration for GNOME that we have for MWM and CDE.
This includes being able to manage the configuration files through RCS
and rdist.  We could end up with a plethora of linux boxes on faculty
desks, and need to be able to easily configure and manage them.

I will do what I can to help with the documentation on this, but at this
point I don't know where things start.

Carl G. Riches
Software Engineer
Department of Mathematics
Box 354350			voice:     206-543-5082 or 206-616-3636
University of Washington	fax:       206-543-0397
Seattle, WA  98195-4350		internet:  riches@ms.washington.edu