I am wanting a custom look for my Ubuntu 10.04 users, so things like the shutdown menu are not displayed and just having one panel at the bottom of the screen. Also removing some of the default folders that get created like Music and Videos. I made a user (test1) and got it to look like how I want, I then copied the entire contents of /home/test1 to /etc/skel and set everything to be owned by root like it should be.
The problem is that when a user logs into the Ubuntu box none of the /etc/skel stuff get copied over. However a bunch of directories like Public, Music, Video and .gconf do get created. I know that /etc/skel only effects new users, so I might be looking in the wrong place.
What I want to have happen is the customizations that I have made get applied to the user who just logged in. I don't want those extra folders created or anything like that. How do I go about accomplishing that?
I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and have users home directories auto-magically mounted when they login using autofs to a NFS mount. The NFS mount contains the home directories of all the users currently in the LDAP directory. I am using OpenLDAP to authenticate my users. I have checked to make sure my user ID's are above what Ubuntu considers a system ID. I have also confirmed that if I delete the folders that Ubuntu creates from my home directory they get re-created upon next login. The same goes for the settings files (like .gconf). I do not know where these directories and files get copied from, but it is not /etc/skel as the created files do not contain any customizations.
Any ideas on how to solve my issue?
Best Answer
I believe that specified files (EX: .profile and .cshrc) from /etc/skel are only copied when you invoke the newuser (or equivalent command) to create a new user. Aside from that it is not used.