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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Desktop Hacks
Take Control of New User Setups #76
Chapter 9, Administration and Automation
|
235
HACK
Be Selfish
Not all the changes you make will be for the benefit of new users. For exam-
ple, I use a character-mode editor called
joe in part because I have made
major modifications to the key assignments so that the editor behaves
exactly the way I like it. All the settings are in the file ~/.joerc.
When I create a new user, I log in as the new user and run
joe to make some
final adjustments to the files. Naturally, nothing works in the editor the way
I expect it to work. because this new user’s home directory does not have my
.joerc configuration file. It’s possible to make a copy, but that involves log-
ging back in as root and changing ownership—which involves more work
than it should. So, for my benefit as an administrator, I have placed a copy of
my .joerc file in the /etc/skel directory so that
joe works the way I expect it to
work every time I create a new user account and log in as that user.
Default Desktop Environments
I have had some limited success at setting up a very basic user configuration
from scratch, and then copying the user’s .kde directory into /etc/skel so that
it becomes the default for new users. The one catch is that KDE usually puts
the username in the ~/.kde/share/config/ksmserverrc file. You can delete the
line containing the username, which might or might not make it possible to
use /etc/skel/.kde ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata