Linux Desktop Hacks

Take Control of New User Setups #76

Chapter 9, Administration and Automation

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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 ...