In message <20000914113355.28547.qmail@st-peters-high.devon.sch.uk>, Mark Evans
writes The major issue here appears to be the lack of a publisher type program (preferably one which stands some chance of reading publisher files...)
Hmmn. Wouldn't VMWare though overcome this, if I limited it to running
I doubt we could get away with this for a couple of boxes, even one room would be expensive. It almost has to be something which can read .PUB, since there dosn't appear to be anyway to export publisher files to something usable with anything else.
For most things the easiest option is the "old fashioned" approach of a global configuration file and *optional* per user configurations (n.b. the global configuation file able to specify things such as unless the user is in a specific group ignore certain options in any per user config file which might exist.)
I was hoping that SuSE's (new) ALICE might help overcome this problem, as I believe it's for network installs (?)
Bad choice of name, "ALICE" already has a reputation here with both me and the librarian :) It would take some basic (though minor in terms of coding) changes to the configuration of the likes of kfm/konquerer/kmail (or whatever your prefered desktop setup is.) (Currently the mechanism is similar to the Windows "profile" system, except for lacking one piece of major brokenness.)
An extension of this would be to have bookmarks, program menus and desktops made up of a global part, parts specific to members of each group and per user addons. Thus the only parts a student can alter are their own additions.
Right. thanks for that, Mark.
Can't really claim much credit, it's simply extending the paradigm used for traditional unix programs (as well as the way Netware does login scripts) to a GUI environment. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763