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IceWM Recipe

Hi all,
I've posted this before but have not had a solution so I'll try again. Setup is K12-ltsp ~ 20 stations Server P-IV 2.4 & 1.5Gig WS P-I, diskless ( floppy boot) Desktop gnome for now

      Request: Is there a way to define user profiles such that they are selected according to the group that the user belongs to at login ?

Yes, it can be done, good luck trying to do it with gnome. Grab a copy of "icewm" and start hacking,it will do all you want. One of the nice things about icewm, is you can assign a global set of apps to all users, but users will only see the apps that they have rights to run, the other apps just won't appear on the menu at all. Another nice thing about icewm is it's very, very configurable, light weight and you can lock it down completely.

Recipe:
1) Replace Gnome or KDE with IceWM
2) Design a global menu for all users in /etc/X11/icewm
3) Create an empty .icewm directory in each user's home directory and chown it to root:root. Otherwise a user can design his/her own menu.
4) Create a separate Linux User Group for each app you wish to make available to a select group of users (ie. iceoffis for OpenOffice)
5) chown the binary (binaries) of the app to root:iceoffis
6) chmod the binary (binaries) of the app to rwxr-x--- (750)
7) Make the users who are allowed to use the app a member of iceoffis
Like Kenneth mentioned you will notice that IceWM automagically only shows those apps a user is entitled to execute. The nice thing about it is that you can even grant your users an xterm window. Even then they wont be able to launch apps they shouldn't. The downside of it all is that upgrades to newer releases are a hell of a lot of work. But then again who needs quarterly releases when working with Linux? I don't ;-)
Success, Wouter

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