Hi,

I have 4 Fedora 10 servers with KDE 4.

We are 2 administrators that we need to use them and we have our personal accounts on them, 2 accounts admin1 and admin2 and no root access.

I need to setup and configure KDE on all of them for all accounts and I mean the desktop wallpaper, start menu icons and application settings. In essence I need to change the DEFAULT KDE settings for all users so we can both login and have the same configuration without having to share a common account. The reason is that we need to have our tools on all 4 servers on the same spot in the menus so we don't lose time looking around for them each time we need to work on them,

I need to customize all configuration, from desktop wallpaper to kde menu icons and even widgets and their settings.

I tried using Kiosk but this didn't work at all, I tried copying my ~/.kde/share/config dir to /usr/share/kde-settings/kde-profile/default/share but that also did not work. I search everywhere but I cannot find where KDE gets it's default configuration files from (so I can overwrite them with my own).

So how can I do that, how does fedora (and other distributions) do this?

I believe KDE 4 ( at least on SUSE ) stores some of its default configuration files in /etc/kde4/share. they are copied from there when an application needs them if they exist, or they are created from the template which is somewhere under /usr

/etc/kde4 only contains contains these empty directories:

env
kdm
shutdown

As does /etc/kde also. And as I said there's a /usr/share/kde4/kde-settings/kde-profile/default where I overwritten them with mine but nothing changed, I made a new user and logged on to check and I still got the default fedora settings.

Isn't there someone who can tell how exactly how does KDE uses and keeps it's default config?

KDE only keeps its settings under /etc/kde4 by default, however distributions modify it, and then you end up with config files in different places. I would recommend looking under /etc/skel and see if there is anything KDE related there.

nektarios wrote:I need to setup and configure KDE on all of them for all accounts and I mean the desktop wallpaper, start menu icons and application settings. In essence I need to change the DEFAULT KDE settings for all users so we can both login and have the same configuration without having to share a common account. The reason is that we need to have our tools on all 4 servers on the same spot in the menus so we don't lose time looking around for them each time we need to work on them,

I don't understand exactly what you want, but the "default settings" take effect *only* on the first login of your kde4.

i.e. if the users have logged into their kde4 session once, all settings are copied to their home directory and changing the default settings thereafter has no effect for them.

So, if you want a default settings when creating a new user, simply copy your own ~/.kde to /etc/skel, which should work for most distributions. But if you want to change the default settings for existing users, I don't see a way since their isn't a concept for default settings then.

Note that some other directories such as ~/.local also need to be included as well, because that is where menu modifications are stored.

You may wish to check the files for user specific paths, which may cause issues under other users.

pansz wrote:I don't understand exactly what you want, but the "default settings" take effect *only* on the first login of your kde4.

i.e. if the users have logged into their kde4 session once, all settings are copied to their home directory and changing the default settings thereafter has no effect for them.

So, if you want a default settings when creating a new user, simply copy your own ~/.kde to /etc/skel, which should work for most distributions. But if you want to change the default settings for existing users, I don't see a way since their isn't a concept for default settings then.

I want to find and change the default source configuration that KDE copies from when a new user logs in the first time and creates the user's .kde settings. /etc/skel in my distribution (fedora 10) does not have anything related to kde.

I even searched the whole filesystem to find settings files but to no avail. Where do they come from?

bcooksley wrote:Note that some other directories such as ~/.local also need to be included as well, because that is where menu modifications are stored.

You may wish to check the files for user specific paths, which may cause issues under other users.

Ofcource i'll check this, thanks for reminding me.

nektarios wrote:I want to find and change the default source configuration that KDE copies from when a new user logs in the first time and creates the user's .kde settings. /etc/skel in my distribution (fedora 10) does not have anything related to kde.
I even searched the whole filesystem to find settings files but to no avail. Where do they come

You cannot change the default, because those defaults are compiled in. Only if you are compiling your own version of KDE from source you can change them.

But you can know what kde do at the startup:

1. check if the ~/.kde/foo/bar directory structure exist
2. if it does not exist, create one with the default configuration.

So if you have a ~/.kde directory structure at the startup, the default configuration will never be used.

Then if you config for yourself, then copy your own ~/.kde to /etc/skel it should work. Because on most distribution /etc/skel will be copied to home dir when creating new user.

Also, if a KDE application needs a file, and the value is available in a file under /etc/kde4/ then it will be used as well. I know this because on first login under my new Trunk account, under the freshly compiled from SVN KDE, it set the Aya theme, which is specified as the default in /etc/kde4/share/apps/plasmarc