Re: Administering Gnome remotely and scripted setups...

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, David W . Jablonski wrote:

> 	I've been looking for documentation on how to do remote management
> and automated scripting of tasks to set up the Gnome desktop and the
> applications.  Basically I'm looking for location of (ascii config files?)
> for the various gnome apps.  I realize some are under the personal
> directory others are elsewhere but I've been trying to do remote support of
> the gnome desktop and I'm running into lack of docs on remote installs and
> setup and tweaking.  When I read the help files for the apps they only
> describe how to configure things through the GUI but I need to be able to
> telnet into a box, run vi and change the settings for various apps but I
> get lost trying to find where I need to make those changes manually.  I'm
> not sure if this is being done yet so if someone could point me in the
> right direction I would be much appreciated.  I'll work on it myself if I
> ever felt confident that I could find out the info.  Thanks...

What in particular would you like to configure?  Things like which applets
go in the panel and where they appear?  The preferences for various
applications?  These sort of configurations are stored in $HOME/.gnome/,
but these file formats generally aren't documented outside of the
application or gnome-core/panel source code.  Thus, while it is possible
to do this configuration by editing the configuration files, you would
have to determine the file formats indirectly (by tinkering or else
looking at the source).

A more simple approach is to set up a clean user account, configure it
exactly how you want, and then replicate the configuration files from that
user onto the new users.  I think this should work fine, although I
haven't tried it myself.

This is what I remember from previous discussions with George.  If my
memory is failing here, could somebody point out anything which is wrong?

Is this in one of the FAQ's?  I guess it really belongs in the Gnome
Administrators Guide, although this document needs some more work.  
Anybody interested in helping out with it?

Dan