[KLUG Members] gnome users in a one app prison

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>>>>>I would like to know how to put a user into a one or two
>>>>>>application
>>>>>>prison in gnome.  I'd like to control these users desktops to have
>>>>>>no
>>>>>>gnome-panel and only an icon or two to execute from the desktop. 
>>>>>>Is
>>>>>>this possible?  They will be getting a desktop through ltsp.  
>>>>>Does it have to be Gnome?  
>>>>No, does not have to.  I was attempting to make this easier by not
>>>>installing another window manager on this machine.
>>>Simple WM's like fvwm are very small.  The advantage is they are easy to
>>>configure to what applications are on the menu.
>>There has been a fair amount of discussion about this over on the GNOME
>>list,  might be worth visiting the archives.
>Even if you can do it with Gnome, I wouldn't use Gnome on a LTSP or
>x-terminal since it's so resource intensive.  Smaller WM's seem to run
>much faster over a network.

It depends on the application.  If your going to run Ximian Evolution, you 
might as well run GNOME as your summoning all its bits in the background 
anyway.  Same for Gnumeric, Abiword, etc...  In which case using another 
session manager actually makes non-gnome more expensive than just running gnome.

But if you talking number of widgets on screen - then yep.  My old NCD X 
terminals really got sloggy slow with anything much more advanced than xfwm.  
Run xearth in the background, no way.  But my Pentium LTSP boxes with 4Mb 
Matrox II cards and fast ethernet can run a full blown GNOME session with all 
the odds and ends without so much as a stutter.

>>>It isn't - done it with both, really essentially the same.
>One other thing you can muck around with (it may or may not work for
>your application), is to not give your user(s) a valid shell in passwd.

/bin/false rulez!