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

[David Van Assche]

I used Sabayon and Pessulus (lockdown manager) to set up controlled
environments for our exam accounts this year, and that worked quite well.
Granted, Sabayon crashes every once in a while, but it works, and I believe
the winbind bug has been fixed now. I was going to write up a little howto,
as I received quite some help from the IRC channel, but try it out... you'll
have to set up seperate user groups and users within sabayon, but from
within sabayon you then have access to the lockdown editor which is then
tied to all the accounts of that user group (for example, students, or
staff, or exam accounts)

Kind Regards,
David Van Assche

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 1:53 AM, nigel barker <tech at hiroshima-is.ac.jp>
wrote:

> Yes, I had kids with whole toolbars full of bloody eyes last year. Not
> good when visitors come around!
> The kiosk tool works, though has some quirks with upgrades resetting
> some customisations.
> The KDE menu is not as short and structured as Gnome, but on the other
> hand it tells you the name of the app and not just "editor". Overall I
> am  enjoying KDE and have no desire go back.
>
> nigel
>
> Richard Doyle wrote:
> > 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
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
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