
Take Control of New User Setups #76
Chapter 9, Administration and Automation
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HACK
Ssh is an incredibly flexible tool, with much more functionality than I can
cover here. See the references below for more fun things you can do with ssh.
See also:
• Ssh manpage
• SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly)
—Rob Flickenger
HACK
#76
Take Control of New User Setups Hack #76
Customize how each new user account is configured by default.
Whenever you create a new user for your system, Linux sets up the home
directory with a slim pack of default files. These files are usually located in /etc/
skel, the skeleton directory for all new user homes. This hack explains what
you can and cannot do (easily, anyway) to customize /etc/skel to fine-tune how
a new user home directory will look and behave.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a default configuration for GNOME
or KDE, then place all the default configuration files in /etc/skel so that they
are copied into each new user’s directory? Everyone would start out with the
same menus, same wallpaper, etc. Well, dream on, because although it
might not be impossible, it’s nothing close to easy. KDE and GNOME have
their own methods for setting up new users, and neither is careful to make
one user’s configuration portable to another. Usernames and full paths to
home directories are littered throughout the configuration files. So, when
you copy them from ...