Enforce User Guidelines And Restrictions With Sabayon On Fedora 8 (Gnome)

Version 1.0
Author: Oliver Meyer <o [dot] meyer [at] projektfarm [dot] de>
Last edited 04/03/2008

This document describes how to set up and use Sabayon on Fedora 8. Taken from the Sabayon page: "Sabayon is a system administration tool to manage GNOME desktop settings. Sabayon provides a sane way to edit GConf defaults and GConf mandatory keys: the same way you edit your desktop. Sabayon launches profiles in an Xnest window. Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user's accounts."

This howto is a practical guide without any warranty - it doesn't cover the theoretical backgrounds. There are many ways to set up such a system - this is the way I chose.

1 Needed Packages

Install the following packages with yum or your preferred yum-frontend.

• sabayon
• sabayon-apply

2 Test User

Now we create a user to test the profiles that we'll create in the next step.

su -
%root_password%
useradd -m homer
passwd homer

3 Sabayon

Sabayon is available in the Gnome system menu.

Enter the root password.

3.1 Create A Profile

First we have to create a Profile. Click on "Add" ...

... and insert a name for the new profile - click on "Add" to save the profile.

3.2 Edit A Profile

Now we have to edit the profile. Select the new profile and click on "Edit".

An Xnest window appeared with a new Gnome session - edit it as you like. Additionally you can make changes to the gnome session mandatory and/or edit the lockdown settings.