Attention:

 Changing the ownership and read/write flags of configuration files 

is not necessarily a fool proof lockdown mechanism, since the user can 

potentially rename the files and create new ones with the correct permissions.

When using a mixed GNOME/KDE environment one has to go one step further 

and unify the menu structure, configuration files, and lockdown mechanism. This 

is not a trivial exercise, since KDE and GNOME use different configuration file 

formats at the moment (KDE a .ini file and GNOME a XML based one). A unified 

configuration system with flexible backends (for example, LDAP) and APIs for 

programmer are needed for larger Linux desktop deployments. There are some 

approaches like UniConf

 (

http://open.nit.ca/wiki/

) 

or even the Linux 

Registry Project 

(

http://registry.sourceforge.net

)

 that could be used for 

that, but these projects are not widely known yet. It remains to be seen if the 

OSDL, freedesktop.org, Novell, Red Hat, Mandrake, or other companies will 

produce new solutions in the future, since the KDE and GNOME projects have 

everything in place.

To keep things simple, companies doing a Linux client migration will probably 

stick to a single environment, so a cross desktop menu configuration system is 

not really necessary. Using an LDAP based configuration system with different 

user groups seeing different menu entries, directories, applications, etc. should 

be the goal in a larger enterprise environment though. We describe an innovative 

customer case in 5.3,  The self managing Linux client  on page 109, where 

something similar has been realized with a special initrd file, which assembles all 

configuration data from many different sources and writes them into a read only 

file system in memory at boot time.

In the last part of this section we discuss file system usage patterns and 

associated problems users face when switching from Windows to Linux.

File systems and their usage patterns

There are many different file systems, like ext2/ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, and 

GFS, available for Linux. If you use extended attributes (EA) and access control 

lists (ACLs), make sure that your backup program and other tools use them too, 

since these are new features for Linux. All these file systems are hierarchical and 

navigated from the top root node down to the directory you are looking for, that 

is, /home/amelie for the home directory of the user Amelie. And access controls 

by default would make this directory accessible only to the user Amelie, and 

system root. 

Remember:

 Linux is a true multiuser system where many people can be 

logged into the same machine at the same time.

 Chapter 4. Technical planning 

61