Customization for distributions

Work in progress

This page has been marked as undergoing heavy editing by user Blu256. Please be patient.

This page is meant to contain customization notes and tips for packagers and distributions that want to offer a custom Trinity experience.

Generic notes

Overriding default configuration

Configuration of the environment and its applications is stored in simple INI-style text files. These files can be stored in several places.

According to the old KDE for System Administrators guide:

There can be multiple configuration files with the same name in the share/config sub-directory of the various KDE Directory Trees. In that case the information of all these configuration files is combined on a key by key basis. If the same key within a certain group is defined in more than one place, the key value read from the directory tree with the highest precedence will be used. Configuration files under $KDEHOME always have the highest precedence. If a key in a certain group is defined multiple times in a single file, the value of the last entry is used.

KDE's cascading configuration scheme can be used to provide users with system or organisation wide default settings while it still allows the users to make individual changes to these settings. KDE will not write entries to the users configuration file under $KDEHOME that match any default settings provided this way. This way changes made to the default settings will immediately be propagated to the user. Note that differs from the traditional way of providing default settings for users through the use of /etc/skel, changes to /etc/skel will only be propagated when creating a new user account.

This means that a system typically uses two levels of configuration -­ the system-provided one (stored in $TDEPREFIX/share/config) and the user-definen one (stored in $TDEHOME/share/config). You can define more TDE prefixes by modifying the environment variable $TDEDIRS (e.g. to provide distribution-specific overrides). This will cause TDE to look for documentation in [PREFIX]/share/config for each of the prefixes, in the order that they are specified.

Desktop Environment

Kicker

Launchers

You can change the default launchers that get added to Kicker on first start by modifying the file $TDEPREFIX/share/apps/kicker/default-apps.

In that file, each line contains a reference to a desktop file. By default a Home button and a Konqueror launcher are placed there. You can add launchers for any applications you want as long as their desktop files are located under $TDEPREFIX/share/appplications/.

As an example, the following modified default-apps will add the Home and the Help buttons, as well as an Amarok, a LibreOffice Writer and a VLC launcher.

 Home.desktop
 Help.desktop
 amarok.desktop
 libreoffice-writer.desktop
 vlc.desktop

Applications

To-do

This section has not been written/completed yet. You can contribute to Trinity by writing or finalizing this section.

Suggested documentation

Make sure you read the "Trinity Administrator Guide" (via the Trinity Help Center), as it contains useful information on deployment and advanced configuration of Trinity.

Other useful resources:

• KDE for System Administrators (archived page)