General :: Customizing Desktop - Setting Limitations / Rights?
Sep 23, 2009
I am working on Fedora, I am trying to figure out if there is any way we can set limitations/rights to linux desktop, so that we can control which things user can access, like if i dont want user to have access to kde control center, and should not change the settings in it, or disable changing wallpaper,or disable changing screen saver. How that can be done in linux?
First off I got to say that Natty is pretty interesting. I really like the space-saving techniques with the omni-bar, vertical app panel, and very fast omni search (similar to windows 7 but much faster). It will take getting used to but I think in the end it will eventually make working much easier and quicker.
It is in beta so I won't get ahead of myself and make assumptions but it seems like Ubuntu has sacrificed a lot of customizability with this release. A few things I've notice that maybe I can get some clarification on-
1. I cannot add panels or items to panels.
I would like to add the system-monitoring tools to my top panel so I can see when my CPU and RAM spikes.
In addition, pidgin no longer appears in my tasks bar. I'm guessing this is a bug? (I prefer it over Empathy. Rather not switch).
2. I cannot find a feature that leaves my vertical app bar visible all the time. When I make an application go full screen it pushes it out of the way. This is a bit annoying when I'm trying to find a file, folder, or application quickly.
Also when I open a file that I didn't mean to open I would like to see it popup in my app bar so I know instantly where to find it and close it. With this I will have to search for it.
Of course this all takes only a few extra seconds.
3. I cannot change the size of my apps in the app bar and it doesn't automatically resize. This might not be a big issue for some but I use my Linux OS solely for work. As a developer I often have upwards of 20 files open and it usually fills my screen when using my avant window navigator. This is significant since I have a wide and short monitor.
4. I am unable to change the orientation of the app bar. This goes back to the fact that I have a wide and short monitor. Because of this it may seem better to fill up space vertically by adding a vertical app bar, but I have so many apps and usually work in text-documents that it would be better for me to have a horizontal app bar.
5. Unable to remove unneeded buttons. My app bar is going to fill up very fast. I do not need a workspace switcher, a home folder, the applications button, or the trash visible in this app bar. I will use these rarely and I would rather make room for apps I use often.
6. Apps at the bottom of the app bar does not adjust context menu accordingly.
However I do like how Ubuntu is finally clipping unseen areas. I am using dual monitors and the one you are looking at is the short one. So when i take a screenshot I can see black area below. In previous versions I would be able to see the overflow. Does this also mean we are finally double image buffering as well?
7. I am unable to change desktop effects. I don't need a massive fancy shadow on every window. I prefer speed over desktop effects (but use Ubuntu for non-free software support).
8. I cannot move the Files & Folder button to the top. I would have use for this context menu since there is no longer a places button in the top panel. But I would rather have it at the top so I can access it easier.
9. Cannot clear recent file's history. As a developer I've worked on a couple adult entertainment related sites. I like to keep these hidden from my little ones for obvious reasons but now it seems there is no way to remove them from recent file history. There should be a context menu for this.
I have just installed Fedora (13) for the first time. It's great ! So thanks to all its developers !
I managed to do many tweaks I wanted to, in no small part thanks to this forum, but here's one that eludes me and my google-fu.
I'd like to customize the login screen (if I grokked correctly, that's gdm). I already saw how to change the background or how to enable automatic login, but what I'd like to do is this :
1. Disable that rather annoying "pong" sound when I select a user,
2. Set a default desktop environment. Gnome seems to be the default environment selected in the drop-down menu, but me, I'd like for it to be XFCE.
Problems with launching data files of the nas and saving to them is a kde problem. The dot desktop files have to contain access rights for smb/http etc and even when given these it still will not work. I have mainly concentrated on getting the VLC video player to work as it is capable of playing from just about any source, comes with codecs etc etc. Amazing package really.
Pure K apps such as kwrite at least work fine. I tried setting up samba but to no avail.
As dropping a file into VLC's focus didn't do anything I created a vlc desktop icon and dragged the nas file onto that. It plays and a kde error message pops up from plasma shell - can't find file!
I enable kde automount. The content of that when it starts is disturbing. It shows my system disks a detachable and not attached! No need to worry though. I selected mount on log in and attachment where the server was shown. VLC still wouldn't work.
Next I enable NFS file transfers on the NAS. This has allowed me to use open with directly onto an avi file on the nas. I can also click launch them. Remaining problem is opening files on the nas from within VLC. Up pops the kde message "you can only select local files". The file manager here seems to be an instance of dolphin. This suggest that there is going to be a problem saving files to the nas as well. Looks to be the case. VLC can convert formats and all sorts of things. If I select a file locally and try and convert it and save to the nas up pops the "you can only select local files" as soon as I select ok having set the path and file name.
Strange thing is that working transfers seem to be using CIF even though it took an NFS enable to get it partly working via KDE's automount. Dolphin only allows a CIF set up which has a distinct advantage as a direct ip address can be entered. The automount has introduced a very very long delay before kde is up and running following a log in. Samba is even worse in this respect and both seem to lack a method of direct ip input which means they have to find the server.
One other aspect. As far as NFS is concerned from a very recent post elsewhere nautilus works. Pass on CIF. And of course it's all instantaneous and ok on windows even on vista. Enabling the TV protocol on the nas has confused Vista as it only wants to connect like that and needs drivers. Might also be down to having NFS enabled though. MS might not like that.
I have filed all of this on bugzilla if anyone would like to vote - bug number 695648. Seems to me that the CIFs route should be the default for ease with many users on home networks. I'm also sure that the problem is basically KDE preventing aps from accessing the nas.
I'm considering setting up a virtual machine running Windows, with Ubuntu 10.10 as the host OS, for those cases where I have a Windows-only program.I understand that using a VM will lose some performance, but are there other limitations to what the OS in a virtual machine can do compared to "running on bare metal"?
For example:
Can a VM play games, like Dragon Age Origins or Civilization V? (Possibly with poorer framerates and/or lower resolution, but does it play at all?) Can a VM rip DVD/Blue-ray using AnyDVD or similar Windows program? Can a VM handle new hardware that requires dedicated drivers, but the drivers are only available for the OS running inside the VM? (Ex. graphics card, digital camera, card reader for smart card authentication.) Is it possible to say anything about "general limitations" of VMs, or is this wholly dependent on the specific VM?
I noticed that firefox sometimes uses a lot of memory. Can something like setrlimit be used to control it? I tried to use it on the command line, but it didn't work.
I have a network of 100 machines, all with ubuntu Linux. Is there a limit to the number of machines that can connect to one single machine (at the same time)? For example, can I have 99 of my machines maintain continuous ssh connection to the 100th machine? Can I have every one of my machines (every one of the 100) maintain a continuous ssh connection to all other 99 machines? How much memory does each such a connection take?
I have the impression that not that many people understand the scope and limitations of GNU General Public License. This is somehow my basic understanding of it. If I take a program covered under the GNU license, first of all I have the right to get the source code. Second, I can modify it at will. Third, I can redistribute it as will too but the new code will necessarily will have the same GNU license. This made me wonder how people actually can charge for software derived from Linux, for instance, Red Hat. Well, my impression is that they really make profit only out of services. In this thread [URL] I think I found a lot of confusion, even from a moderator (not intended to offend). Red Hat is based on Linux and it is necessarily covered under GNU. Somebody probably bought the program from RHE and can make it available at no cost.
Nevertheless, the moderator decided to warn the user. In this article [URL] it says the following:"Our training is not designed to promote vendor lock-in. Though these courses are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the source code for [RHEL] is available to the community via the GPL [GNU General Public License]," said Red Hat spokewoman Leigh Day. This thread [URL] shows yet more confused people. Is there is a glitch in this type of license that prevents programs like RHEL to be redistributed for free? Why their license page doesn't mention GNU license? Or the problem is just that people get overwhelmed by this license and are afraid to be penalized and get paralyzed? By the way, RHEL is just the example. The key question is about the license!!
I have a Linux system, RH Enterpise 5, that I must toggle between two different languages, one being English, but when I am in English mode I only want to get capital letters for my user programs. I can't use the Caps-lock key, because then the default key to toggle between the languages no longer works when Caps-lock is on and I need to be able to switch back and forth languages with a single key stroke. So, I need capital English letters but mixed case second language characters and a single key to toggle between the two. I can't figure out a solution for this. I have tried different mods to xmodmap, but can't solve it for both languages.Oh, slight correction, the default keys for toggling languages Alt-R and Alt-L are fine, just need upper case in English mode.
I want to play around my .bashrc file, but I can't seem to find a general guide to customizing it. I just want a guide that will show me examples and explain them in-depth.
The distribution I chose came with the GnoMenu, and it's really cool that I can customize it. But so far I only know how to change the GnoMenu button itself to things that I have to download from the internet. How to create my own GnoMenu button themes? And sound themes, if you have a lot of spare time?
I have a Debian machine running IceWM. I want to set it up so when userA signs in they get a screen resolution of 1280x1024 and normal size icons and normal size cursors. Then I want it setup so if UserB signs in they get a screen resolution of 800x600 larger icons and larger mouse cursor icons. How can I customize the display settings per user with IceWM? I did not see where I can set these options in ~/.icewm/preferences.
Under Linux, I would like to be able to launch anything from command line in a "safe" environment, i.e. be assured that it can't read or write any file on my computer, and even better if it couldn't access the network.I thought about creating a user with reading rights only in the current folder (and nowhere else), and su to this user to launch the command, would this work ? And what about the network ?
I am using linux mint and have installed Netbeans on it but whenever I run netbeans from accounts other than root it throws an error for not having permission to start glassfish server of netbeans. I also tried running this application using run as administrator option but then the application does not start.
So is there a way to assign netbeans admin rights permanently so that whenever I start this application from other accounts I should not face this error?
I am using samba from a windows client to put some rights access on FTP server on Linux. created a folder and I want that a user can write in that folder (put a file for example), but, once he did that, he can't delete or rename the file.
When booting PartImage from a USB SysRescCD, at the PartImage 'root@sysresccd / root %' prompt, I try each of the following three commands:- touch /media/partimage- chown root /media/partimage- chmod 666 media/partimageAnd each time, I receive the following error message: 'Changing permissions of 'media/partimage': Read-only file system.'The attempt is denied.How can I grant PartImage root access rights to this directory?
On my Debian server I installed Samba for sharing directories in my local network. I know how to set access rights but I have a problem. I would like to allow an user (example "nobody") to create files or directories in a shared directory but to deny to modify or delete something.How can I do that?Second question, on a file, I know that we can set rights for "u", "g" and "o". But like the NTFS permissions, can we apply rights for each users?
I have created a new user using sudo adduser "user1" from the root .but this user does not have full admin rights...How to give full access to this user1?
I need to share some space on my hard disk with my wife, over our home network. I'm dualbooting Ubuntu and Windows.
My Ubuntu partition is limited to 30GB, and the Windows partition gets all the remaining disk space. Does /host suffer size limitations while being accessed through Ubuntu, or it's size is the same as the Windows partition?
EDIT: For the record, she's using Windows XP on her machine, only... no dual boot. Couldn't get her off Windows yet, but i'm still trying
I have a network camera, with a linux OS. We need it to be really precise in its timing for the specific application we want it for. But it's not!
After killing some of the garbage processes on it (and having some achievements, but not enough), it seems that there's some kind of bandwidth limiting applied on the outgoing traffic.
My question: What are all the things that should be done on a machine, running linux, to remove all the bandwidth limitations?
Notes:
1- With my very basic knowledge about traffic shaping in linux, I have made these observations:
# tc qdisc ls dev eth0 qdisc pfifo_fast 0: root bands 3 priomap 1 2 2 2 1 2 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 # tc qdisc del dev eth0 root RTNETLINK answers: No such file or directory
2- I am trying to download the images from an HTTP link, and I already have about 14Mbps. I want it to reach at least 50Mbps. I can download with speeds higher than this when downloading from another PC on a windows network. So I assume this is not a problem with the cables. Also the eth0 on the camera is said to be a 100Mbps device.
How can I mount a device with specific user rights on start up? I still have some problems figuring it out. I would like to mount the divide with uid=1000 and gid=1000. My current entry to the /etc/fstab/ file looks like this:
I have a few FTP users on my linux server(running vsftpd). They all have their own directory and can upload and delete files in that folder.Now, I was wondering whether it would be possible to create special permissions/rights for users. For example, I would like to make it so that certain users could not upload .exe files, or I want a certain user to only be able to upload image files (gif, jpg).
I recently converted and .avi file to dvd .iso and when I try to play it in my dvd player. I get this message "playback prohibited by area limitations". I was wondering what does that mean and how do I get this movie to play.
Coming to the point, as per object, I'm playing ( read also as "messing up" ) with mldonkey since last weeks and I have managed to get it working correctly on my home network ( behind router and firewall ). Next step in my development plan was to enable remote access to mldonkey web interface from any external network, like for example a friend pc. I'm aware of the "IP Access Restriction" in the mldonkey configuration file (downloads.ini) but there I can only specify an ip ( or ip-range) to allow access.
So the question is: how can I manage to disable* ip restrictions upon access, so that with a DNS-aliasing service I can access mldonkey web page virtually from anywhere?
(*) = maybe this is not the correct word but it explains the concept.