does pessulus actually work?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

I'd love to hear from anyone who:

1. knows of some decent documentation for pessulus.
2. has had any success using pessulus.

Anything I've tried with it has been completely ineffective.  I ran it as
sudo (presuming it needs to write to /etc/gconf.d/) and as an experiment, I
thought I would disable user switching.  This would be a simple test and nice for
our thin clients which can't do user switching anyway.    I also decided to
disable the command line, to see what effect that would have.

The answer in both cases was no effect whatsoever.  I thought perhaps
pessulus had failed to write the gconf settings, but this is the contents
of /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/%gconf-tree.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
        <dir name="desktop">
                <dir name="gnome">
                        <dir name="lockdown">
                                <entry name="disable_command_line" mtime="1179177637" type="bool" value="true">
                                </entry>
                        </dir>
                </dir>
        </dir>
        <dir name="apps">
                <dir name="gnome-screensaver">
                        <entry name="user_switch_enabled" mtime="1179177620" type="bool" value="false">
                        </entry>
                </dir>
        </dir>
</gconf>

Now when I logout and login again user switching works perfectly and I can
use the command line as normal.  It appears this setting has made no
difference whatsoever or perhaps more accurately the applications are
completely ignoring the settings created by pessulus.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Gavin