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

[Richard Doyle]

On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 10:52 -0700, john wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 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?
Sabayon has promise, but wasn't stable for us. I'm not aware of any
other single lockdown tool, but there are lots of more specialized tools
that can help. Pessulus is quite useful and Alacarte can makes it easy
to edit menus (you will also need to place restrictive permissions on
gmenu-simple-editor). Firefox needs special attention, but much can be
accomplished by adjusting file and directory permissions.

> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John
>