[sabayon] Profile or profile changes not applied

[Martin Jungowski <martin rhm de>]

I have a three seemingly separate issues with Sabayon (v2.29.5 but had
these problems with 2.29.0, too) concerning how profiles and profile
changes are applied (or rather not getting applied) to users.

Problem #1
----------
Installed Sabayon 2.29.5, configured the system according to our needs
and added the local users who are supposed to work with this machine
using useradd (default procedure, nothing fancy). After creating a
common profile and ticking the checkboxes next to the users that are
supposed to use this profile the necessary .gconf.xml* and .gconf.path*
files and folders are not created. When these users login for the first
time Gnome applies its default profile, including panel, menu, etc.

In order to create the necessary .gconf.xml* and .gconf.path* files and
folders I have to do the following:
- link /usr/sbin/sabayon-apply to /usr/bin
- login as user
- run sabayon-apply

However, if the user has already logged in before the Sabayon profile is
not getting applied, see Problem #3


Problem #2
----------
Profile changes are not getting applied to the users who are assigned to
the profile in question. This means that if for example I decide to add
a panel object after the users have already logged in for the first time
and loaded the Sabayon profile at least once this panel object is not
getting added to the users' panels. This also goes for updated objects,
for example fixing typos in autostart objects, editing the menu, etc.

Running sabayon-apply does not fix this. I have to manually run rm -rf
.gconf.xml* rm -rf .gconf.path* first, then sabayon-apply for each user.
I'm assuming that problem #1 and problem #2 share a common cause, but I
haven't been able to figure it out yet.


Problem #3
----------
When users change anything themselves the profile is rendered worthless.
I've tried that with the Gnome panel and the Gnome menu. As soon as the
user adds an object to the panel him or herself the Sabayon profile
panel is not loaded anymore. This means that adding a new object to the
profile panel on our part is not reflected in the user's panel, not even
after going through the steps listed in #2. I found out that in addition
to these steps I have to remove ~/.gconf/apps/panel/
This does, however, delete all user-specific modifications.

This also means that if a user has logged in before we assigned a
profile to him or her, and the default menu and panel has already been
created, the Sabayon profile is not applied to that user at all.



We could easily do without solving problem #3, since that's only a minor
annoyance. We don't want to lock our users down, so desktop and panel
modifications (user-specific background, panel objects, desktop
starters, etc.) are allowed for most of them. We found a solution to do
it the hard way - whenever we decide that a new object needs to get
added to the profile panel or the profile menu we'll revert every user
to this default profile. This barely ever happens, anyway, so it's not a
big deal. It would be nice though if Gnome would still load the Sabayon
profile first, then apply user-specific modifications on top of that
base profile.

However, problems #1 and #2 are a major annoyances. We're rolling out
Sabayon on one of our new servers, with about 150 users connected via
XDMCP, and depend on a reliable profile management tool that applies
changes when they're saved, and also applies profiles to the users we've
told it to.

Thanks in advance,
Martin

-- 
Rieke Computersysteme GmbH
Hellerholz 5
D-82061 Neuried
Email: martin rhm de

HRB Muenchen 73617