Towards a simpler desktop environment: What is the current state of the art?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 27 May 2008, john wrote:

> I am getting complaints from teachers that students are customizing
> their desktops to the point that they are distracting students from
> productive work. I'd like to make the edubuntu desktop MUCH simpler,
> just an applications menu and little else. I guess the approach is to
> lock the desktops but I'd like to take the "right" approach. I've used
> both the gconf-editor and Sabayon in the past with mixed results. The
> last time I looked Sabayon was seriously broken ( I use winbind to
> authenticate users and after applying Sabayon no students could log
> in). I don't see that gconf-editor has the ability to lock the
> desktop, prevent changes to desktop fonts, backgrounds and remove
> access to system settings.
> 
> Does anyone have a recipe for simplifying and locking down student desktops.
> Does anyone have experience with KDE/Kiosk Tool and would anyone
> recommend this over the gnome environment?
> How can I get _complete_ control over the user environment?

A slightly contrary alternative answer (I don't know much about sabayon
etc.) is that you could give them a very limited desktop like fvwm95.

	http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/

It's not that pretty, but it's a familiar format and it doesn't offer much
customisation.  Actually, that's not true it offers lots, but you mostly
need to do it by modifying rc files and students are unlikely to figure
that out. 

Gavin