Hi,

I am running SLED11 with KDE 4.3.5, and have a requirement that the desktop context menu (the one that shows up with a right-click on the desktop) is disabled for all users. As a compromise, it would be sufficient to remove most items from this menu and have, for example, only the 'Logout' shortcut available.

I have searched this topic fairly extensively but have been unable to come up with any concrete answers. From what I can determine so far:

1) The items in the desktop context menu are hard-coded and cannot be easily changed
2) The required Plasma restriction to disable the context menu is only available in KDE 4.4 and up

Are these assumptions correct? If so, is there any way (regardless of the uglyness of the hack) to edit or disable this menu in KDE 4.3.5? Any help would be appreciated.

If your version of KDE has support for Mouse Actions, then you may be able to disable this. Otherwise, it isn't possible, and you need to update to a newer version of KDE, as disabling this in KDE 4.3 would require altering code...

bcooksley wrote:If your version of KDE has support for Mouse Actions, then you may be able to disable this. Otherwise, it isn't possible, and you need to update to a newer version of KDE, as disabling this in KDE 4.3 would require altering code...

Are you sure (not about the mouse actions since those most definately can be used to disable the context menu, although one must remember to do so on every activity)? This sounds like something the kiosk-framework should be able to handle. And if that's not possible, there is a workaround although a rather hackish solution...use xmodmap to remap a right-click to do nothing. Unfortunately, that "solution" brings the rather severe disadvantage that right-click won't work anywhere.

Disabling right-click via xmodmap is unfortunately not a good solution for us as we will be accessing these desktops remotely via xvnc. I will take a look at the Mouse Actions solutions.

Kiosktool is not something I have been able to get to work under SLED11. Slightly offtopic, but I haven't been able to find much information about how Kiosktool actually works - is it implemented by kbuildsycoca4 or something? How are kiosktool policies enforced in KDE4?

Thanks for the replies - BTW, I'm a New Zealander living in Sweden, so it's strangely coincidental that my first two replies should come from a Kiwi and a Swede

KioskTool has still yet to be ported to KDE 4. The underlying Kiosk framework however, is functional, but Plasma has little support for it before KDE 4.4. Is there any reason why you cannot upgrade?

bcooksley wrote:Is there any reason why you cannot upgrade?

Because this is an enterprise environment, and KDE 4.4 is not provided/supported by Novell under SLED 11.

I suppose the crux of the matter is that KDE 4.3.x (and consequently the distributions which rely on it) is unsuitable for deployment in kiosk/shared-access scenarios, as disabling execution of arbitrary commands is a major consideration for these environments. I guess I will try to work around it somehow and let you know if I come up with a solution.