Re: Persistent Desktop Environment
Teemu Likonen composed on 2019-12-28 03:03 (UTC-0500): > Henning Follmann wrote: >> So is there a way to lock down firefox user interface? I want only >> bookmarks visible and editable (add). But no accidental drags or >> clicks to change the user interface. Is that possible? > I don't know. With Firefox I would start by studying if the internal > configuration options in about:config page can be edited with external > tool. Such tool could set some values to the desired value when user's > session starts. If a file named user.js exists in the profile directory, Firefox reads it and applies its settings on every startup. Firefox never writes to user.js. In theory, once everything is configured as desired, prefs.js could be copied to user.js. The problem with that is that prefs.js does not include every setting, only those that differ from defaults. So, it would take a lot of effort to determine from about:config those settings that would need to be reset at each startup and manually insert them into user.js. I've never looked, but I suppose one might be able to determine all possible defaults, and there are far more than will ever show up in prefs.js, by examining source. The same examinations would need to be done for any installed extensions as well. Note that there is one preference that is never part of prefs.js: the location of the profile. That location is included in the file that inventories all existing profiles ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini. This enables profiles to be located anywhere that is writeable by the user. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is religion, not science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/
Re: Persistent Desktop Environment
Henning Follmann [2019-12-27T16:17:04-05] wrote:
> Somehow my parents are still messing up their computer.
> So is there a way to lock down firefox user interface? I want only
> bookmarks visible and editable (add). But no accidental drags or
> clicks to change the user interface. Is that possible?
I don't know. With Firefox I would start by studying if the internal
configuration options in about:config page can be edited with external
tool. Such tool could set some values to the desired value when user's
session starts.
> Any advice on how to lock the Desktop Environment?
I have maintained a school computer system which had some computers with
generic user account for all users. In those computers I wanted to
restore specific default settings every time the computer is booted (or
rather, when the user desktop session starts). As the root user I made a
tar package of certain normal user's configuration files and wrote a
script in /etc/X11/Xsessions.d directory. The script would unpack the
tar file and do some other things to get the default settings.
The generic problem is that the files that keep program's configuration
are not always part of program's public configuration interface. The
file names can change, the file format can change etc. Perhaps a good
advice is that configuration should be edited only through documented
configuration interface. Sometimes configuration is in a documented text
file format. Sometimes there is a command-line tool to change
configuration (git config, notmuch config, ${program}ctl etc.).
Sometimes nothing is documented and user should only open the main
application.
You can probably restore some configuration quite easily but if you
build too complex and fragile system it will cause more maintenance work
than the original problem of restoring settings manually from time to
time.
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Re: Persistent Desktop Environment
Henning Follmann (12019-12-27): > Any advice on how to lock the Desktop Environment? Don't use a desktop environment, use a simple window manager with a configuration in a text file. Regards, -- Nicolas George signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Persistent Desktop Environment
I am the family administrator. And with a global user base too. Somehow my parents are still messing up their computer. Not deliberately more by accidental clicks or drags. So now I would create the most simplistic destop environment which is most resilient to accidental changes. So is there a way to lock down firefox user interface? I want only bookmarks visible and editable (add). But no accidental drags or clicks to change the user interface. Is that possible? For email a would like to use geary. And again lock the UI. Or as an alternative, could you backup the ~/.config directory and restore at every reboot? Would that restore the default state of GNOME apps? Then a reboot would automatically reset the user interface. Any advice on how to lock the Desktop Environment? -H -- Henning Follmann | hfollm...@itcfollmann.com
