
Take Control of New User Setups #76
Chapter 9, Administration and Automation
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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 ...