Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

[ritz <khadgaray gmail com>]

Hi

On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 16:22 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> Hi, all,
> 
> A while ago, during the development of openSUSE 11.1, I wrote an
> extensive patch for Nautilus to let a system administrator set up
> desktop icons which would show up in users' desktops.
> 
> I can't find anything on the mailing list archives related to this, nor
> in my Sent folder, so I guess I only talked to this to Alex on IRC.
> 
> The idea is this:
> 
> You are a system administrator, and you would like to populate your
> users' desktops with some icons:  a link to the helpdesk, or some
> commonly-used template documents used in your site, or something like
> that.
> 
> My implementation works like this:
> 
> 1. The sysadmin sets the /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir key
> in GConf to point to a directory.  Nautilus will see what files are in
> that directory, and it will show them as icons in users' desktops.
> 
> 2. Users see the desktop items and can manipulate them as usual, except
> that some of them may not be removable.
> 
> 3. If the sysadmin drops a .desktop file in the predefined_items_dir,
> then that file may have an "X-XDG-Is-Mandatory" boolean key.  If it is
> true, then the user cannot remove that item.  If it is false, the idea
> was that the user could hide that item away from his normal view, and
> show it again if he turns on "Show hidden files".
> 
> My implementation's policy was biased towards the sysadmin - items are
> mandatory by default, and you have to make them non-mandatory
> explicitly.  Alex wasn't happy about this, if I remember correctly.
> Fortunately, that's easy to change.
> 
> Anyway --- my old code for this is here:
> http://gitorious.org/nautilus/nautilus - look for the branch called
> "sysadmin-desktop-items-opensuse".
> 
> I am not happy at all about the code in there, though.  My idea was to
> turn NautilusDesktopDirectory into something like
> NautilusMergedDirectory, which would combine the contents of ~/Desktop
> and the directory which the sysadmin had configured.  This proved to be
> rather hard, and the branch in that repository reflects that; there are
> a lot of fixes and general cruft that I haven't cleaned up yet.
> 
> I just wonder if this is something that people generally want.  If so, I
> can rebase the code to a recent version of Nautilus and try to clean it
> up.  I'm also wondering if there is an easier way to "merge" the
> sysadmin directory into the desktop directory.
> 
>   Federico
> 

Sounds like
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331460




-- 
Ritesh Khadgaray
Linux and Desktop
Ph: +919970164885
blog: http://khadgaray.blogspot.com
Eat Right, Exercise, Die Anyway.