I just prepared a laptop for my wife running KDE 4 on Debian Wheezy. Sometimes she inadvertently changes settings in her desktop environment. And complains that she cannot find the shortcut/applicaton/clock or that her sound doesn't work.

So I just want to lock down her KDE settings exactly as I have it configured. No, she doesn't have to change anything ever. Applications like Firefox should retain their history though, so making .kde readonly is not the solutions.

I know KDE offers a "kiosk mode". However it seems that locking down a complete environment involves the editing of 398 files, adding [$i] on the first line.

That is a little too much for a making a simple configuration immutable just for her. Any suggestions how to do that easier? Isn't their some kind of master file in KDE which controls all immutabilities?

jlinkels

Hmm...perhaps making the .kde4 directory 400 (chmod -R 400)? Should make it read-only, which would prevent modification of the configs, but not sure how that would affect applications that may need to write temporary info to those files/directories. Never tried anything like this, to be honest.

You could always get a 'working' config, and copy the entire .kde4 directory elsewhere, and just overwrite whatever is there when she logs in. But any new apps she loads up will get their configs blown away, unless you copy THAT config over...lather, rinse, repeat.

I tried this before and it does not work very well. Shame on me but I forgot what exactly the problems are. It was about 4 years ago. But I remember it was not satisfactory.

Yes, I did this before. I don't about applications that she installs. She has to ask me anyway. The drawback with this option is when I change a configuration I usually forget to update that "golden" image. But in general it works. And some scripting should make it easier to maintain the image.

But thanks for the answer, I now have more confidence I don't overlook something obvious.

jlinkels

I don't quite understand. There ist that little golden cashew-nut like symbol. Click on it and you can lock your widgets. Doesn't that do the trick?

First you can unlock it as easily and second there are a gazillion other settings which are not locked with the cashew. And believe it or not, my wife (or my genius little son) have managed to unlock the panels and change settings which I am not able to get back.

jlinkels