[sabayon] Various troubles...

[Thomas Erb <thomas erb c sn schule de>]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently having some trouble getting Sabayon to work the way I want it.

I'm using sabayon 2.29.5 on an Ubuntu 10.04. We have a rather
complicated environment dealing with LDAPed user accounts, smb-pam_mount
so in order to make things a bit easier I started out completely with
local accounts - one sudoer for the creation settings, one tester for
trying them out. Oh - just in case that matters - tests are being done
on a virtual machine (using VirtualBox 3.2.6). Apart from the things
said above, the system should be a complete standard installation.

The things I want sabayon to do for me are - I thought - quite simple.
The system is meant to be used later in a school environment so we want
a rather clean autostart - no Ubuntu One for example - and desktop
settings that stay the way they are (especially desktop background, but
also other appearence settings). It's not really necessary (although
nice to have) to actually lock down those settings (preventing users
from ever changing them) as long as changes that have been made are lost
the next time the user logs in.

I started out with a very simple change:

Create a foulder on the desktop. Absolutely no problem with that. It
works as expected so I conclude that - in general - I'm not doing
anything entirely wrong.

Next thing is the desktop background:

Start the admin-tool, set a different background - fine up to here - and
make settings mandatory (by changing the wooden shield into an iron
lock). That's where the trouble starts: Which settings? I tried those
that seemed obvious to me:

GConf-key "/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename"

Saved the profile - no effect.

After that I tried

GConf-key "/desktop/gnome/background/*"

and later I added

File ".gnome2/backgrouns.xml"

Still no effect.

In the end I even tried to make absolutely _everything_ mandatory
(knowing that this might cause more harm than good) - nothing. :-(

I gave up.

Finally I tried to remove some programs from autostart. When trying to
make those changes mandatory, the admin-tool crashes with a fatal IO
error 11 (Resource temporarily unavalable on X server :1.0.

Any hints, ideas, suggestions or anything else that helps would be
greatly appreciated...