[YLUG] Dumb question?

[David Harker]

Hi Rob,

I don't know off the top of my head if there are any third-party
applications to do this, but since all your desktop/window manager
settings are stored in ~ the easiest way to do it seems to involve at
least a little bit of editing files.

If it were me, I would create a new user to be your template for say a
kids account, change all the settings you want to sensible default
values while logged into that account and then copy the home dir for
the template user onto the newly created kids users home dir once
you've created the accounts. If I wanted to stop them from
accidentally damaging things I'd just set the relevant files to be
read only to them (and possibly owned by another user to enforce
this).

If you wanted to be able to "lock down" the desktop settings for a
group of users, replace the relevant configuration files or
directories in their home directories with symlinks or mounted folders
pointing at the same files in the template user's home directory. The
kids should then be added to a user group which gives them read only
access to these; to change all of their settings at once, log in as
the template user and change settings there (though you may wish to
make sure they're logged out when you do this).

This approach means you can "write protect" various different
files/folders depending on what stuff you want them to be able to
change, while allowing them to do anything else they want to their
home directory to allow individual saving of bookmarks, media settings
etc. etc. I expect there might be a far more elegant way of doing this
but the above sounds like it would work - is it of any use to you?

Regards,
David

2008/5/18 Rob Hall <rob at waylock.co.uk>:
> Hiya,
>
> This is going to sound really lame as I can do this task using Windows
> in my sleep!
>
> I want to allow my family to use my computer and I want to give them a
> customised desktop and limited menu. Is there any way of doing this on a
> group basis - i.e. if I created accounts for each of my children and
> added them to a group called 'kids' their desktop and menu would be
> fixed and if I did the same for my wife and added her to a group called
> 'betterhalf', her desktop would be another way.
>
> I know that I can go in and manually edit their menus but I really don't
> want to have to do this for all of them individually and it does open me
> up to the wider question of how to administer groups under Linux so I'm
> keen to learn.
>
> Making sense? I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 for what it's worth.
>
> Ta
>
> Rob Hall
>
>
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-- 
David Harker
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