Chico2 desktop machine configuration/Archive

Some obsolete information about Chico2 desktop machine configuration is kept here, for the sake of history.

Sharing GNOME configuration (panel and icons) among various users

Background: we had already configured the chico2 machine for one user (vislab) having a custom desktop and icons. At one point, for some yarp run tests, we needed to create a new user (icub) that ideally should have the same desktop appearance as vislab.

Attempt 1: symbolic links

We placed custom icons and gnome-panel configuration files in locations under /usr/share, so that both users (icub and vislab) could see them and be synchronized.

• enable Vislab's custom set of icons (which we have previously drawn and copied in /usr/share/icons/vislab_icons) by creating this symbolic link:

  cd ~/Pictures
  ln -s /usr/share/icons/vislab_icons vislab_icons

• associate the custom icons to predefined actions (which we have previously copied in /usr/share/vislab_launchers):

  cd ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/default
  ln -s /usr/share/vislab_launchers/ launchers

• and some more (previously copied in /usr/share/gconf/vislab_objects):

  cd ~/.gconf/apps/panel
  ln -s /usr/share/gconf/vislab_launchers objects     // it may be necessary to rmdir the previous "objects" dir first

However, as one can see these operations are cumbersome. Besides, the "mirrored" user (icub)'s desktop still didn't look like the originating one (vislab). We decided to move on to other techniques.

Attempt 2: Sabayon

It turns out that the graphical tool Sabayon helps share and manage user configuration files and GNOME settings. So, we installed the version available for Ubuntu 8.04: Sabayon 2.22.0 (not the latest version, which is 2.25 as of May 2009).

Sabayon is a handy tool, however it didn't behave correctly in our experiments. It crashed often, especially after making changes to the newly-created Sabayon user profile desktop.

Conclusion

We did things the hard way and manually created the panel buttons for user icub, in the same fashion and with the same pictures as they had been added for user vislab.