Hello guys:
Is there a Group policy equivalent in linux?
A way to centrally manage several apps behavior/features/etc etc like windows does?

Regards
Fabian

I think you need to be a bit more specific. When you refer to groups, do you mean file permissions, or are you referring to application behaviour, like file open dialogs, etc?

Both can be done in Linux with some limitations. Most distributions use a standard filesystem that allows you to specify user, group, and world access rights to each file. You can also install packages that give you more capabilities, like access control lists.

If you are refering to program look and feel, programs compiled for KDE will use the default KDE settings, whereas gnome applications use gnome settings. Some applications will intelligently use what ever desktop environment is running.

Thanks
Group Policy comes in Active Directory. It is a big set of configurations/features etc that can be applied to any computer or user, any program everytime the user logs in to the network, Things like "No allow the user to see the control panel", "Allow only these users to use the comand promtp", "Only allow this user to change the date /time on his computer" etc etc, The number of things that can be controled this way is really huge.
One can also assign applications to a user, and if the apps fails o the remove it from his computer the next time that he logs in the apps is re-installed. If only a library or dll is missing the missing parts get reisntalled, etc etc.
You can also control the way they use the Internet Explorer, I mean it is really big.

I know that we can control the login of the users on the network , the shares (NIS + NFS) we can also have a centrallized database of users (LDAP)
But this other thing , Group Policies, I have not see something like that in any distro. Am I missing something ?

Regards

Fabian

As far as I know Linux cannot mimic the group policy behaviors of a Windows AD. You can configure Samba to act as a primary domain controller, and actually setup a windows like domain using samba. The functionality you get from that is centralized logins, logon scripts, logoff scripts, and roaming desktop. I think that's as far as it goes, at least for the time being.

Thank you very much msound , That is exactly what I think
Regards