Is it possible to prompt for admin/sudo password when unlocking widget on the KDE4 desktop.


I admin several computers for a variety of people, and the biggest problem I get calls for is the lack of icons on the desktop. No matter how many times I "Lock" the desktop after servicing the computer. I get a call a few days later saying, "Somehow the icon is just not there"

In this case, I would recommend making the settings in the Plasma configuration files "immutable" meaning that users cannot override them. This is possible with KDE's Kiosk framework. Please see techbase.kde.org for further information.

When configuration files are marked immutable in whole or in part the user will no
longer be able to make permanent changes to the settings that have been marked
immutable. Ideally the application will recognize this and will no longer offer the
user the possibility to change these settings. Unfortunately not all applications
support this at the moment. It's therefor possible that the user will still be
presented with an option in the user interface to change a setting that is
immutable, changes made this way will not be saved though. In some cases the
user may be able to use the changed setting till the application terminates, in
other cases the changed setting will simply be ignored and the application will
continue to work with the immutable setting.

Thank you, I will definitely try it, because these incessant calls are truly annoying.

I can not even do it by remote desktop because nine out of ten times the K-launcher has been removed as well (???), and forget about making an icon on the desktop for it.

I have gone as far as making a "rescue user" account, so if they render their user inoperative, they can log into that user to establish a remote desktop session. With the result being they log in and use that user to work on, because they don't want to have to disturb me, and end up doing the same to that user.

Sorry for venting, ... I just don't understand, how... argh.

May I suggest that in a future builds or releases of KDE4 or 5 that maybe you look into adding that ability to require a password on unlocking the desktop applet. Just a suggestion. (I know this is not the popper channels to make suggestions, just figure since I got your attention.)

Could possibly be considered for the future yes. Feature requests such as that should probably be made at bugs.kde.org however to get the developers attention.

Another method, if that doesn't work is to simply replace the ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma* files on each new login. Simply adding a script into ~/.kde4/env/ that does this should be sufficient ( as KDE is pretty much not running when those scripts are sourced )