Preventing from modifying xfce-panel

As Xubuntu can be used in a network (as jericho said in a previous comment), it would be nice to control the access and permissions of non-admin users on some elements like the xfce-panel.

Well, good news, the xfce team thought about it and they created a ‘kiosk mode’ wich enables the administrator to define some restrictions on specific xfce elements. Second good news, the xfce-panel has now support for Kiosk Mode to prevent users from making changes to their panel configuration.

Here is how to do it :

You have to edit or create the file ${sysconfdir}/xdg/xfce4/kiosk/kioskrc.

You can modify the xfce4-panel section of your kioskrc to look like this:

[xfce4-panel]
CustomizePanel=%powerusers,foo

This allows only users in the group powerusers and the user foo to customize their panels.

If you want to allow no one to customize his panel, just type :

[xfce4-panel]
CustomizePanel=NONE

Notice that you can control permissions also for other parameters as the following example shows

[xfce4-session]
CustomizeSplash=ALL
CustomizeChooser=ALL
CustomizeLogout=ALL
CustomizeCompatibility=%wheel
Shutdown=%wheel
CustomizeSecurity=NONE

Hope this new tip will help in adopting Xubuntu for network, multi-user solutions

Xubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu’s xfce flavour

I’d like to talk about a Ubuntu flavor not very famous but really nice. It is Xubuntu, a linux operating system as Ubuntu, but based on xfce as a desktop environment (like Ubuntu is based on gnome, Kubuntu is based on KDE..).

The main advantages of this flavour are :

* xfce is faster than gnome (and KDE of course)

* the Xubuntu Live CD is just 560 Mb and contains only the essential things (Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp, Pidgin, a word processor, a spreadsheet, essential accessories like terminal, text editor..)

* the artwork is really clean and easy in the eyes

* all the advantages of a linux and a Ubuntu-based operating system

Hello world!

Welcome to my blog. I’m a computer engineering student. This is my first post. I will be talking about computing technology and specially Linux and Java EE stuff. Hope you will like it.