Hi All,

This is more of a non urgent general enquiry, I have tried a few searches so far but found little info that helps me out.
I am a bit of M$ guru but have been trying to finally get myself over to Linux for a while and I have to say I love it. I have a background in Solaris, which I have found helpful so I am not a total stranger to the Linux/Unix environment.

In my quest towards better moving over to Linux, and of course trying to convert friends and family to my new love of Linux and Samba (for the server end). What I really need is an easy way (or guide) to create and modify default profiles. After I build a system with a Distro and install my chosen apps such as firefox etc and I have created all my links and got the desktop looking how I want and the apps opening for the correct file type etc. How do I then make this profile the default so all other created users are based on this original user? – Any help on this would be great.

Thanks in advance
Sm1ler

your choice of desktop manager (e.g. KDE or Gnome) might well have a higher level way to deal with it's own things, but at a lower system level, when you create a user all files existing in /etc/skel (for skeleton... which kinda makes sense...) will be copied to the users new home directory. In theory this could include KDE desktops and such, but generally it's more used for, as i said, the lower level things like setting up filepaths and things.

Have a look in /etc/skel. Copies of the files in there are what will be present in a newly created user's home directory. You can create another directory if you want to create an alternate profile and pass that option to useradd with the -k option: useradd -G users,games,audio,cdrom -m -k /etc/my_own_skel new_user or something similar.

Do keep in mind that you should use relative paths so the profile doesn't depend on the name of the user.


Håkan