Hi On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 16:22 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > Hi, all, > > A while ago, during the development of openSUSE 11.1, I wrote an > extensive patch for Nautilus to let a system administrator set up > desktop icons which would show up in users' desktops. > > I can't find anything on the mailing list archives related to this, nor > in my Sent folder, so I guess I only talked to this to Alex on IRC. > > The idea is this: > > You are a system administrator, and you would like to populate your > users' desktops with some icons: a link to the helpdesk, or some > commonly-used template documents used in your site, or something like > that. > > My implementation works like this: > > 1. The sysadmin sets the /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir key > in GConf to point to a directory. Nautilus will see what files are in > that directory, and it will show them as icons in users' desktops. > > 2. Users see the desktop items and can manipulate them as usual, except > that some of them may not be removable. > > 3. If the sysadmin drops a .desktop file in the predefined_items_dir, > then that file may have an "X-XDG-Is-Mandatory" boolean key. If it is > true, then the user cannot remove that item. If it is false, the idea > was that the user could hide that item away from his normal view, and > show it again if he turns on "Show hidden files". > > My implementation's policy was biased towards the sysadmin - items are > mandatory by default, and you have to make them non-mandatory > explicitly. Alex wasn't happy about this, if I remember correctly. > Fortunately, that's easy to change. > > Anyway --- my old code for this is here: > http://gitorious.org/nautilus/nautilus - look for the branch called > "sysadmin-desktop-items-opensuse". > > I am not happy at all about the code in there, though. My idea was to > turn NautilusDesktopDirectory into something like > NautilusMergedDirectory, which would combine the contents of ~/Desktop > and the directory which the sysadmin had configured. This proved to be > rather hard, and the branch in that repository reflects that; there are > a lot of fixes and general cruft that I haven't cleaned up yet. > > I just wonder if this is something that people generally want. If so, I > can rebase the code to a recent version of Nautilus and try to clean it > up. I'm also wondering if there is an easier way to "merge" the > sysadmin directory into the desktop directory. > > Federico >
Sounds like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331460 -- Ritesh Khadgaray Linux and Desktop Ph: +919970164885 blog: http://khadgaray.blogspot.com Eat Right, Exercise, Die Anyway. -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
