Re: Desktop Default Applications ???

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 05:18:15PM -0400 or thereabouts, Irena N Tuzla-Johnson wrote:
> I am trying for some days to figure out a way I can make a default
> desktop environment for some applications (like maple, mathematica, etc)
> for a considerable number of users. The only thing I found is that in
> the home directory, when gnome is run, are being made the following
> directories:
> .gnome
> .gnome-desktop
> .gnome-private
> 
> The aplications I create on the desktops are being found in
> .gnome-desktop
> 
> I didn't find any default or global settings. However, these must be
> somewhere, because, at the first start of gnome, on the desktop are
> already some applications.
> 
> Can someone help me? I need it to run tomorrow.

No-one ever answers this, so despite never having done it, I'll
give it a shot:

Your best bet is Paul Cooper's Gnome Adminstrators' Guide at 
http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~pgc/gnome/

He would be very pleased if anyone who has set up GNOME for multiple
users would email him details. All big networks are different, and
so a bunch of "here's the set-up, and here's what we did" accounts
would be cool.

Before he wrote this, I used to tell people to try looking at
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/libgnome/gnome-gnome-config.html
and searching down to ``How Config Items are Read.'' There is stuff
there about

     * $(sysconfdir)/gnome/config-override - a system administrator would
       put config items in this directory that they don't want to be
       configurable.
     * ~/.gnome - this is where the user's config items are written to
       and is the next place that is searched
     * $(sysconfdir)/gnome/config - this directory would hold system wide
       default configuration values.

     Possible uses for this are setting system wide defaults such as..

<snip>

I don't know whether this works, how this works, or anything else
about it. It might help, or it might be a complete red herring.
But it's the best I can do, and I offer it in the hope that someone
will be inspired to correct it all and write up how they did it,
because I _keep_ seeing this question, and I rarely see answers to it. :(

Telsa