Alternative: What would you recommend for a TS client?

Codegen · 03-21-2008, 09:51 AM

So, considering my previous post doesn't seem to be getting any hits, and I have a four day weekend to play around with crap, what would you recommend for a computer that's going to be used solely for connecting to an RDP terminal server?

Here's what I need:

User account cannot modify any desktop settings, or any other settings for that matter (The latter should be easy, though with XFCE, the former doesn't appear to be possible).
Icons to connect to TS and shutdown the system.

That's pretty much it.

I'd prefer to do this with Xubuntu if possible, but I don't need to have XFCE installed.

XavierP · 03-21-2008, 11:43 AM

http://www.ltsp.org/ and if you go to the downloads section and look at the second option you'll see that there are Ubuntu packages.

Codegen · 03-21-2008, 12:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XavierP

http://www.ltsp.org/ and if you go to the downloads section and look at the second option you'll see that there are Ubuntu packages.

I thought LTSP had to have its own server, though?

I'll check it out.

XavierP · 03-21-2008, 02:59 PM

Misread, apologies. Check out the RDP client.

Codegen · 03-21-2008, 05:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XavierP

Misread, apologies. Check out the RDP client.

I know about that, it's included with pretty much every distro, isn't it?

I'm kind of referring more to being able to lock down the machine.

XavierP · 03-22-2008, 05:18 AM

What you'll probably need to do is to track down which files in the user's home directories control the desktop and change the permissions so that users can read them but only root can write/modify.

Codegen · 03-22-2008, 06:17 AM

I tried changing the ownership of .config/xfce4/mcs_settings/desktop.xml (I've found that this controls things such as wallpaper) and setting permissions on it to 755, and setting ownership to the admit account.

Here's the funny thing:

When I go to reset the wallpaper, or something, it changes anyway, and when I go back to check the permissions on the file, the ownership is back to the student account.

jschiwal · 03-22-2008, 06:32 AM

How about "sudo chattr +i .config/xfce4/mcs_settings/desktop.xml"

Using 755 permissions still allows the user to delete the settings file and replacing it. Deleting a file writes to the directory and not the file. The desktop environment might be doing that on it's own also. I don't know if this would cause problems with nasty messages for the user when logging out. Maybe changing a setting so that the session is not saved when logging out would help if that were the case.