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 a Xephyr window, which provides an X session within an X session, like Xnest.

Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user's accounts. Currently Sabayon is limited to the creation and update of user preference profiles. It does not deal with the very large problem of actually populating target system with those preferences. So far Sabayon supports complete files and the configuration format for:

Download Sabayon at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/sabayon/

To unpack the source, open a terminal and type :

$  tar -zxvf ~/sabayon-2.29.0.tar.gz
$  cd sabayon-2.29.0
            

Then you can configure and compile the program:

$  ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --mandir=/usr/share/man
$  make
$  sudo make install
            

Add a user (you must have root permissions) :

# /usr/sbin/useradd -c "Sabayon user" -d /var/sabayon -g nogroup -s /sbin/nologin sabayon
            

Create the directory /var/sabayon :

# mkdir /var/sabayon
            

Apply the following permissions :

# chown -R sabayon /var/sabayon
# chgrp -R nogroup /var/sabayon
            

Your distribution probably contains a pre-packaged version of Sabayon which will be supported directly by your distribution. Search for the package 'sabayon' in your distribution's package management tools.

For those who wish to be on the bleeding edge, you can install Sabayon from GNOME's git repository.

Installing from git is precisely the procedure as installing from the tarball, with the exception of obtaining the release from git, and running the autoconfigure tools.

$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/sabayon
$ cd sabayon
$ ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr
            

At this point, simply follow the same instructions for configuring and compiling the program as you did for installing from a tarball.

Your first step will be to launch Sabayon. If you've installed Sabayon from your distribution's package manager, it may have an icon available for you under the Administration menu. If you've installed from source, you may need to launch it manually. Press Alt+F2, and type:

gksu sabayon
            

and press Enter. After you've authenticated, you should see the main window for Sabayon:

Figure 1 Main Window

Sabayon's main window for creating, and applying profiles.

To create a new profile, just click on the Add button. You'll see a window, called Add Profile, where you can name the profile, and optionally, select an existing profile which will be the basis, or starting point of this profile:

Figure 2 Add Profile

Add Profile window for Sabayon.

Now that you've created the profile, you will want to edit it. Select the profile name, and click on the Edit button:

Figure 3 Main window - Edit

Main window - Edit

A "desktop within a window" is opened:

Figure 4 Edit Desktop

Edit desktop

Within this window, you may make whatever changes to the profile that you wish. You can add launchers or applets to the panels, add launchers to the desktop, or create example files in the home directory.

When you are done, you may want to look at what changes to the default session that Sabayon has detected you've made. You may do this by clicking on the Edit menu, and selecting Changes. You should see a screen that looks like the following:

Figure 5 Changes window

Edit Sabayon's saved actions in the changes window Edit desktop

You can modify what Sabayon will save in the profile in the changes screen:

Then save the profile by selecting Profile  ▸ Save The Profile is saved in /etc/sabayon/profiles, as a .zip file with the name you selected for the profile.

GNOME also includes the lockdown features of Pessulus, which allow you to do things like prevent users from modifying their panels, opening a Run Application dialogue, etc.

You can use the lockdown editor by selecting Edit ▸ Lockdown on the Desktop editor window.

Figure 6 Lockdown editor

Edit GNOME's lockdown settings from Sabayon.

Important: it is advisable to create a new user to test the profile.

Select the profile that you want to apply and click on Users : Then, select the users that you want to apply the profile. In this example Eleve1 and Eleve 2 will have the profile my_profile.

Figure 7 Apply profile by user

Apply a profile to only certain users.

A common desire of systems administrators is to apply profiles by group. You can do this either in the gui tool itself, or alternatively, by a manual script.

4.2.1. Via the gui

Simply use the simply sabayon-apply script, which is shipped with Sabayon by default, but within the gui tool, select the Group button, and check off which groups you wish to apply the profile to.

Figure 8 Apply profile by group

Apply a profile to users who are members of a group.