On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 21:36 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Sure you can have every user redefine every single parameter - but even > if users with different tastes do happen very frequently, the vast > majority of cases will be users sharing the same customisations (because > of the site/corporate policy, or there is only one computer-addict in > the family, etc). This is BTW one of GConf biggest weaknesses right now > - it's easy to change things on a per-user basis, but much less so on a > per-system (or per-group) one, unless you want to dig into GConf > internals and fight your distribution idea of what the defaults should > be. You shouldn't have to fight the distribution if you do it properly (granted "properly" isn't necessarily obvious); the distribution defaults are in the schemas and the site-local defaults should be set as the values themselves. There are plans to make it simpler: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html but I believe it works fine now once you figure it out. To set a default do something like: gconftool-2 --direct --config-source=xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --set /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources true all users should then get reduced_resources=true by default and AFAIK Red Hat packages will never overwrite this. If you run gconf-editor as root and choose "New Defaults Window" and change stuff there, in principle that's the same as the above command line. Making this a bit worse, gnome-panel specifically (which I realize is the app most people want to set up defaults for) is harder than other apps. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-December/msg00007.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-December/msg00012.html Havoc