Lingering Users and Painfully Slow OpenOffice Startup

[R. Scott Belford]

Today, with prelink having been run

aptitude install prelink
/usr/sbin/prelink -avmR

With the fixes applied to a template user from here

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu

With watchdog running

wget http://www.morokeni.ch/edubuntu/gnome-watchdog_0.9.2_i386.deb
dpkg -i gnome-watchdog_0.9.2_i386.deb
(and aptitude install gtkdialog)

and after updating the profiles of all users with the script below, some 
of the kids actually were heard to say, "this is fast!"

:-)


Yeah, so, hate to reply to myself, but my scripts were definitely wrong. 
  With about 400 users on an ldap authenticating samba/nfs sharing 
server, we manage templating a user as follows:

I have two scripts to accomplish this

more copytemplateuser.sh

#!/bin/bash

# settings
BASE_HOME_DIR=/home/students
TEMPLATE_FILE=/home/students/template/template.tar.gz
BASE_TEMPLATE_DIR=/home/students/template

cd ${BASE_TEMPLATE_DIR}

tar -cvzf template.tar.gz * .[a-zA-Z0-9]*

cd ${BASE_HOME_DIR}
for USER in `ls`
do
     echo 'Extracting for user:' ${USER}
     cd ${BASE_HOME_DIR}/${USER}
     tar -zxvf ${TEMPLATE_FILE}
     chown -fR ${USER}:Domain\ Users * .[^.]*
done

and, because I have not conveniently determined a way to update 
permissions and ownerships of hidden files within the user's directory 
as well as well as of the users' directories themselves, I run this next

more permissionchangedirectory.sh

#!/bin/bash

# settings
BASE_HOME_DIR=/home/students

cd ${BASE_HOME_DIR}
for USER in `ls`
do
     chown ${USER}:Domain\ Users ${USER}
done


Not pretty, but it does work.  I then extract the template.tar.gz file 
in /etc/skel of our 7.10 Edubuntu server for new users.

--scott