Several days last week I spent at Liholiho further preparing the software configuration for the school session beginning August 4th. On Thursday we figured enough of the atalkd config so the Linux server can act as the school's central file server. On Friday Ray Strode and I spent several hours working on the default desktop application settings.
* Ray reworked the default Gnome desktop to make it look more like MacOS with the menu at top. It looks very streamlined and easier to use now. * We attempted to force Mozilla to be locked into certain prefs using lock_pref directives, but Mozilla refused to start when using the additional config file despite all documentation online insisting that it should work. It might be a bug in Mozilla 1.4, or maybe we were doing something wrong. Still need to investigate this. * OpenOffice could have better default preferences that are less confusing to the users. Other than the Mozilla problem which can be easily fixed for all user profiles later, the only remaining thing that needs to be done is user accounts for the students and teachers. Peter, it would be far easier to script creation of the users and groups when you know the class assignments for the groups so you don't need to go through 300+ accounts and set the correct groups manually. The accounts work something like this: 1) Create user accounts for everyone, students and staff, each with the default private group of the same name. 2) Create class groups, add a class group to each student. This is mainly for the purpose of easy identification later for scripted jobs (like deleting the entire graduating class). We'll figure this part out later. 3) Add the teacher to each of the private student groups within that teacher's class. This along with proper umask permissions will allow the teacher to read all files saved by their students, but students cannot read another student's files. 4) Add Samba accounts associated to the teacher's Unix account for teachers that use Windows. There is a short script you can add to Windows bootup to mount the public TRANSFER folder as drive T:, and otherwise they need to type \\LINUX\USERNAME in order to access their home directory on the Linux server. Without using a domain or Windows Scripting there is no easier way at the moment. (And I know nothing about Windows scripting at the moment.) Currently the only thing I don't know how to do is set the umask for files created from MacOS by AFP over TCP. So Peter, whenever you can get me the complete lists of students and their classes I can script account creation and the server should be ready for students. This is exciting... Almost ready! Warren Togami [EMAIL PROTECTED]