KNOW YOUR DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT

For flexibility, KDE resources can be stored anywhere on your computer. To find those resources, KDE uses a set of paths, some pre-defined, and some stored in the KDEDIRS and KDEHOME environment variables. KDE applications use these paths to save their settings and find their data.

By default, /opt/kde, the directory where KDE is installed, is automatically added to KDEDIRS. Additionally, any number of supplemental KDE directories can be added by setting KDEDIRS appropriately.

For example, if you decide to store KDE application data on a pair of NFS partitions mounted at /mnt/nfs1 and /mnt/nfs2, it would be a simple matter to search those directories by adding the following to the user's environment:

KDEDIRS=/mnt/nfs1:/mnt/nfs2:$KDEDIRS 
export KDEDIRS 

Given that setting, KDE applications will search for settings and data in both of the NFS partitions as well as the default /opt/kde directory. Of course, users are rarely given write privileges to shared system directories, so KDE provides the concept of "home" directories used to store the user's personal configuration and data files.

The default user path is set to ~/.kde, but this value can be changed to any arbitrary location by setting the KDEHOME environment variable. As with KDEDIRS, multiple paths can be defined in the KDEHOME variable (just separate the individual paths with a colon), allowing for maximum flexibility.

KDE uses the configuration directories to implement a cascading configuration system. When a KDE application reads a configuration setting, the installation directory is searched first, followed by a search in the directories defined in KDEDIRS. Finally, the directories defined in the KDEHOME variable are searched. In case of conflicts, the last value read is the setting that is actually used.

The exact order in which the default, KDEDIRS, and KDEHOME directories are searched can be seen by running kde-config with the -path config option. For example, the configuration directories known to KDE on the admin computer can be seen with the following command:

# /opt/kde3/bin/kde-config -path config 
/home/root/.kde/share/config/:/opt/kde/share/config/

Here, root's KDEHOME directory, and the default installation directory, /opt/kde are listed. (It's important to note that the directories shown by kde-config -path config are listed in precedence order. That is to say, settings found in files in KDEHOME have higher precedence than those found in KDEDIRS; in turn, settings in KDEDIRS have higher precedence than those found in /opt/kde. Also note that precedence order is always the reverse of scan order.)

Ready to Customize

With that background in mind, let's change KDEHOME on admin to be /remote/shareda/kde-share by putting the following into our .profile (or, if you use another shell, into its start up file):

KDEHOME=/remote/shareda/kde-share 
export KDEHOME 

By changing KDEHOME to the shared directory, any changes we make in the KDE Control Center or in any KDE application on the administration system are automatically saved to the network mounted share directory. This can be easily confirmed by running kde-config again:

# /opt/kde3/bin/kde-config -path config 
/remote/shareda/kde-share/:/opt/kde/share/config/  

Using admin, tinker with KDE to configure your desktop as you want it to appear for all of your users. Then, when you're ready to deploy your standard desktop, install KDE on each desktop, and use NFS to mount fileserv:/shareda/kde-share on /opt/kde/share on every user's machine. This latter step supplants each user's local KDE configuration files with your "corporate standard" configuration.

Settings in ~/.kde will override any settings found in the NFS mounted directories. This allows you to define system-wide defaults and allow individual users to create their own customsettings. And, as we'll see in the next section, you can greatly limit what they can customize, too.

With your administration system set up, any changes you make from now on in the KDE Control Center or in any KDE application are mirrored on all of the desktop systems.

Obviously we won't want to use our administration system as a day-to-day desktop, at least not with KDEHOME set as it is. A pratical option is to set root's environment so it can be used for KDE administration. Logging in as a regular, unprivileged user allows the administration system to be used as a regular desktop. In larger environments, you may also want to use a revision control system, such as CVS, to store the configuration files.