Configuring desktops of many users on same computer

English Install/Boot/Login
1

A substantial part of effort of every fresh opensuse installation (not upgrade) is taken by configuring the desktops of users, including superuser. Many things need to be configured: fonts, background picture, panel, file associations, terminal’s look, Forefox’s look and behavior, desktop’s content, colors, window decorations, clock, power management and so on.

This time, with 13.2, I decided to do the following: fully configure one user, and copy all of his home to home directory of all users. Then change the ownerships. Users’ data must backed up on external hard drives and users’ home directories didn’t contain files other than ones auto-generated during the installation.

This saved me a lot of time and seems working. I have two issues, though.

It appears that

cp -R /home/tom/* /home/sam/

does not copy the dot files. I thought ‘*’ means ‘everything’ and the cp command will be able to understand and not to pick up all higher-level directories. I ended up using Dolphin for copying, with Alt + . setting to show the dot files.

And I worry about some links that might not change from tom’s links to sam’s links, invalidating sam’s links. For example, there may be a link file in tom’s home pointing to /home/tom/config.dat In sam’s home, the copied link file will be pointing at /home/tom/config.dat instead of /home/sam/config.dat

2

No, “*” does not match the names of hidden files.

Maybe try


cp -R /home/tom/.  /home/sam/.

though note that I have not tested that command.

I would probably use:


cd /home/tom
tar cf - . | ( cd /home/sam && tar xpf - )

because that will do a better job of preserving links (both hard links and symbolic links).

And yes, there are also files with specific names.

Within “.kde4” I am seeing:


lrwxrwxrwx 1 USERNAME users   25 Jul  5 01:55 cache-HOSTNAME -> /var/tmp/kdecache-USERNAME
lrwxrwxrwx 1 USERNAME users   30 Nov  1 07:09 socket-HOSTNAME -> /run/user/1001/ksocket-USERNAME
lrwxrwxrwx 1 USERNAME users   16 Jul  5 01:55 tmp-HOSTNAME -> /tmp/kde-USERNAME

At least for KDE, you can just delete those before you copy. They will be recreated. And, of course, you have to get the owner/group right for the new user.

3

On 11/09/2014 04:16 PM, ZStefan wrote:
>
> A substantial part of effort of every fresh opensuse installation (not
> upgrade) is taken by configuring the desktops of users, including
> superuser.
> Many things need to be configured: fonts, background picture, panel,
> file associations, terminal’s look, Forefox’s look and behavior,
> desktop’s content, colors, window decorations, clock, power management
> and so on.
>
> This time, with 13.2, I decided to do the following: fully configure one
> user, and copy all of his home to home directory of all users. Then
> change the ownership. Users’ data must backed up on external hard drives
> and users’ home directories didn’t contain files other than ones
> auto-generated during the installation.
>

In the future you may want to consider using /etc/skel and then creating
all the required users :wink:

–
openSUSE Factory 64 bit
KDE 4.14.1

4

copying with scp will preserve the rights and the ownership will be switched to the user where it is copied.(scp -pr my_files new_user@localhost:~/). my 2 cents. i use it on a daily basis and i didn’t see anything incorrect. good luck!

5

In addition:
At least KDE let’s you change the defaults in /etc/kde4/share/config/.
Just copy the changed KDE config files there and they will be default for all users (even old ones, although the user’s config will not be overridden of course if specifically set already)

Other DE’s/applications might offer similar possibilities.