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Issue #8 June 2005
Suppose that you are an administrator of a large network. Part of your job involves creating user accounts for new people. Every user has different needs. Technically, you can tailor a desktop for every one of these new users. However, that would quickly get very tedious.
Although users' needs are different, it is possible to segregate these users into various groups. For example, a casual user would only need easy ways to access their mail and the Internet. A graphic artist would need easy access to drawing programs and other visual tools. A visually impaired user would need large fonts and high contrast displays. Each of these users would find the others' desktop settings inconvenient if not confusing.
Instead of creating a new desktop setup every single time a new user comes along, it would be much easier to create some templates. If only there were an easy way to make and manage these templates.
Fortunately, we are not the first to ponder this issue. The creators of Sabayon decided to tackle the lack of a good desktop setting management tool. With Sabayon, they created an application that handles these problems and more.
Sabayon takes and expands the concept of user profiles. A user profile is a set of desktop settings grouped together under one name and can be considered a template for a specific user type.
With Sabayon, you can currently:
Being able to edit and combine GConf settings graphically is a big improvement; manually editing GConf settings is a thing of the past. Although GConf is a very useful tool, using it has always been a bit tricky. With Sabayon, managing settings has been simplified.
The version tested and used to write this article and for the screenshots is the latest version from GNOME CVS as of the end of May 2005.
The Sabayon package is now located in the Fedora Extras repository. To add this repository to your yum configuration, follow the directions located at the Fedora Extras website. Then, at a shell prompt as the root user, enter:
yum install --enablerepo=extras sabayon-admin
To run Sabayon from Fedora Core 4, go to the panel and select -> -> -> . The Sabayon window comes up as shown in Figure 1, Starting Sabayon for the first time
To create a new user profile, select .
A window shown in Figure 2, Adding a new user profile appears.
Enter the name of your new profile in the Profile
name area. As this is the first user profile to be
created, it is a good idea to start with a simple one. In Figure 2, Adding a new user profile, I have entered
Casual, my term for users who would only
need a minimal setup.
Now that you have named your new profile, select . Your new profile is now listed in the main Sabayon window. Select it and click . Within the new window that appears is the Fedora login screen. When it finishes, notice that it looks exactly like a miniature default desktop as shown in Figure 3, Editing a profile.
The window in the middle is Sabayon's monitor. Every time you do something in the Sabayon Edit window that changes a savable setting, it is recorded on this monitor. As you log in, any applets appearing in the panel are recorded.
Using the desktop in the Sabayon window, make the desktop look the way you want. For example, in Figure4, Making some changes, we have changed:
File '.gnome2/backgrounds.xml' changed
Panel object 'object_1' added
GConf key
'/apps/panel/applets/workspace_switcher/prefs/display_all_workspaces'
set boolean 'true'
Every entry has two checkboxes on the left: Ignore and Mandatory. While these checkboxes can be left alone without incident, they can come in handy once you have gotten used to reading Sabayon's output.
While you are making the profile, settings are sometimes created that are irrelevant. You can select Ignore next to these settings to keep Sabayon from remembering them. Ignoring irrelevant settings keeps the user profile from gaining too much filler. For example, in your Sabayon window, select -> -> . The Sabayon monitor window lists many setting changes as the Desktop Background window appears and as it runs. Some of these settings can be seen near the bottom of the Sabayon monitor shown in Figure 4, Making some changes. Only the setting change that appears when you manually change the background is necessary. You can safely check Ignore for all the other rows associated with the Desktop Background window.
If there is a setting that you want to lock in place, you can select the Mandatory checkbox associated with the change. For example, say you are tired of people asking why their panels have disappeared when they have accidentally set it to autohide. You want to lock it so that the user cannot change this setting. Set autohide to false by right-clicking on the panel. Select . As autohide is already off, you need to toggle it on and off to get the setting to appear correctly in the Sabayon monitor. Once it is there, select the Mandatory checkbox. Once this user profile is saved and implemented, users with this profile will not be able to change this setting. The Properties window for their panel will look like Figure 5, Locked preferences.
Any setting that does not have either Ignore or Mandatory selected is implemented for the users when they log in for the first time. However, they are able to change these settings and their changes will override your initial settings.
Once you have the desktop the way you want it, you need to save the profile. If you quit without saving, the user profile reverts to what it was before you started editing. To save, from the Sabayon window, select -> . The saved settings disappear from the Sabayon monitor. You can make more changes if you like (and then save again), or you can quit the editing phase by selecting -> .
Some settings when saved are hard to undo. For example, if you lock a setting by checking the Mandatory flag and then save it, you cannot change that setting again in the edit window. To remove this setting, you need to either revert to a prior version or find that setting and delete it in the Details window. For more information see the section called “Reverting to an earlier version”.
To create another user profile, select again. Name your new user profile. If you want to use any previously created user profiles as a starting point, select it from the Base on choices.
Now that you have some user profiles, it is time to give them to your users. Select the user profile you want to assign and select . The selection window appears as shown in Figure 6, Assigning user profiles with all the available users on your system. Choose which users to have this user profile. The association occurs immediately.
One of the original goals of Sabayon was to create easy version control of user profiles. Unfortunately, it is not quite ready yet. There is some version control, but it is confusing and sometimes ceases to work.
To access the version history of a user profile, select that profile and click . The date stamp of the latest version is shown in the menu and the settings are listed underneath as shown in Figure 7, Viewing the version history.
Click on the date stamp menu. The date stamps of the various versions are shown with the newest being on top. Selecting an older version causes a few things to happen simultaneously:
To return to an older version, select that date stamp and selecting -> in the Details window. However, instead of using the old date stamp, it uses the new date stamp you created when you started viewing the older versions.
When reverting to an older version, if you are just using this window to see what the history of the user profile is, you can quit this window without saving by selecting -> . It prompts you to make sure you do not want to lose your changes, but as that is exactly what you want to do, select to close the window.
Although a version history is useful, sometimes it is unnecessary. For example, if you have finally achieved your first user profile after many attempts of trial and error, you may not want the previous versions available. To delete all prior versions, select -> . This action leaves the current version as the only version available.
Currently, the Sabayon Details window leaves you with a blank list of settings when you delete the history. However, if you save your changes, close the window, and reopen it by selecting the button, the information appears as normal.
This window also allows you to delete any settings that may be extraneous and/or unwanted. Select the setting in the list that you do not want and select -> . The setting disappears in the version you are editing.
All GConf and Firefox settings can currently be set in user profiles. Possibilities include:
These are just some ideas of what you can do with Sabayon. The creators have stated that their next goal is to enable Sabayon to recognize and save OpenOffice.org settings.
Although Sabayon is already usable, it is still in development. The maintainers invite and welcome you to help in one or more of the following ways:
For testing and fixing bugs, you may find it necessary to build the latest version of Sabayon from CVS instead of using the prepackaged version. The latest version can be downloaded from GNOME CVS.