Tim.R
January 17th, 2008, 05:11 AM
I am a systems administrator at a university and we run several computer labs that (will) run Ubuntu 7.10.
Unfortunately Matlab does not play nice with compiz, so it needs to be disabled. Disabling the desktop effects via the Appearance customisation menu only does so on a per-user basis, and I would like them to be disabled globally by default.
If you log in as a user whose home directory has no .gnome* and .gconf directories, GNOME nicely regenerates them for you. Does anybody know how I would go about changing the GNOME defaults to turn off desktop-effects? The home directories are NFS-mounted and it's pre-semester, so I have no problems deleting everyone's .gconf or .gnome* directories. There is nothing in /etc/skel (not that there should be), nor /etc/default, /etc/gnome or /etc/gconf that seems to be related.
I turned on the effects, copied the .gconf files to a temporary directory, turned them off again and ran a diff. Apart from a bunch of meaningless changes (such as timestamps), I found this in .gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/%gconf.xml
desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/%gconf.xml
6,7c6,7
< <entry name="default" mtime="1200540264" type="string">
< <stringvalue>/usr/bin/metacity</stringvalue>
---
> <entry name="default" mtime="1200539625" type="string">
> <stringvalue>/usr/bin/compiz</stringvalue>
If I could find where GNOME stores its default config, I could make this change. gconf-editor says that it's deprecated, though, so presumably therefore it makes the change somewhere else as well (and I can't find that).
I *could* just copy a sample set of user configurations over to each user's home directory, but that isn't very robust as it assumes that they won't delete this.
It's not necessary to lock the students from using it, only to have it off by default.
Ideas?
Unfortunately Matlab does not play nice with compiz, so it needs to be disabled. Disabling the desktop effects via the Appearance customisation menu only does so on a per-user basis, and I would like them to be disabled globally by default.
If you log in as a user whose home directory has no .gnome* and .gconf directories, GNOME nicely regenerates them for you. Does anybody know how I would go about changing the GNOME defaults to turn off desktop-effects? The home directories are NFS-mounted and it's pre-semester, so I have no problems deleting everyone's .gconf or .gnome* directories. There is nothing in /etc/skel (not that there should be), nor /etc/default, /etc/gnome or /etc/gconf that seems to be related.
I turned on the effects, copied the .gconf files to a temporary directory, turned them off again and ran a diff. Apart from a bunch of meaningless changes (such as timestamps), I found this in .gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/%gconf.xml
desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/%gconf.xml
6,7c6,7
< <entry name="default" mtime="1200540264" type="string">
< <stringvalue>/usr/bin/metacity</stringvalue>
---
> <entry name="default" mtime="1200539625" type="string">
> <stringvalue>/usr/bin/compiz</stringvalue>
If I could find where GNOME stores its default config, I could make this change. gconf-editor says that it's deprecated, though, so presumably therefore it makes the change somewhere else as well (and I can't find that).
I *could* just copy a sample set of user configurations over to each user's home directory, but that isn't very robust as it assumes that they won't delete this.
It's not necessary to lock the students from using it, only to have it off by default.
Ideas?