Cloning KDE settings for other users? (to developers)

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kikinovak
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Cloning KDE settings for other users? (to developers)

Post#1 by kikinovak » 23 Jun 2011, 10:30

Hi,

I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France), and also a (born-again) Slackware user. I see you guys tweaked the KDE desktop, for example to use Firefox instead of Konqueror, etc. I also have my own "KDE Light" version of the Slackware desktop (e. g. rebuilt the whole KDE set by leaving out a few packages and patching most of them in a one-app-per-task policy).

One problem I have left, though, and which you seem to have solved, is cloning user profiles. Let's say I have a user kikinovak on my system. When I start KDE, the desktop settings are stored in ~/.kde (similarly to GNOME, where settings are stored in ~/.gconf, or XFCE, where it's ~/.config). With GNOME or XFCE cloning user profiles is dead simple, as it's normally sufficient to copy over the whole .gconf or .config directory to /etc/skel before creating other users. Now the trouble with KDE is that the .kde directory contains some user-specific settings, e. g. when I do a grep -R kikinovak ~/.kde, I see that "/home/kikinovak" is actually used in some of the configuration files.

The quick&dirty solution I have found for this is simply erase those files which contain user-specific information and then copy over the remaining files to /etc/skel. How did you guys solve this?

Cheers from the sunny South of France.

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fanthom
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Re: Cloning KDE settings for other users? (to developers)

Post#2 by fanthom » 23 Jun 2011, 21:06

hi kikinovak,

i'm using 'grep' to find root/guest references and fix them manually.
i can imagine a bash script which could do it automatically with help of 'grep' + 'sed' utilities.
can't share it as i dont have one....
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kikinovak
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Re: Cloning KDE settings for other users? (to developers)

Post#3 by kikinovak » 25 Jun 2011, 06:12

By "fix them manually", do you mean something like "replace every occurrence of /home/username by ~"? Or do you simply erase those files that mention usernames explicitly?

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Re: Cloning KDE settings for other users? (to developers)

Post#4 by fanthom » 26 Jun 2011, 05:13

it's not only about the paths but also ownership. Trinity has a config which allows starting kmixer for certain user, if it's root then it asks for the password (sorry - cant remember name of this file now).

i used to replace every occurrence manually to make sure all is working ok. there are only few configuration files which are shipped with default ISO so it's not a big hassle for me.
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