Are global panel contents possible?

[Stephen Hurd]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote

>>>>>I'm looking for a way to easily add a small set of required panel items
>>>>>to *all* XFce users on a system.  Ideally, it would just be a separate
>>>>>contents.xml that is merged with the users one (And, of course, items in
>>>>>it could not be removed/modified)
>>>>>
>>>>>Does such a thing already exist?  Is it vaguely possible?
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>
>It is fundamentally different from the way the panel works now, but it 
>is not necessarily a bad idea.
>
>I'd like to hear other people's opinion on it. Do you think this would 
>be useful to you?
>  
>
Well, the reason I would like it is that I've finally retired the last 
two Windows systems in the house.  Right now, I have a dual PIII 1GHz 
system with 2GB of RAM running as an applications server.  The rest of 
the systems in the house are generally no better than a PII-266.  
Essentially, they're the cheapest systems I could dig up with an AGP 
video card.

My wife and both the kids have their "own" systems (Just X servers 
really) and, of course, want to be able to customize their panels.  Our 
youngest (12) recently managed to delete Mozilla from his panel, and I 
got an eerily familiar feeling when I had to fix it for him.  Later, I 
finally got around to building MPlayer with eSound support, so I needed 
to add it to everyone's panel... at this point a matter of manually 
patching each contents.xml.  When I find myself manually editing XML 
files for a GUI program, that generally triggers an "Am I missing 
something?" question.  My needs would have been equally well accomidated 
by a command-line thing that allows launchers to be added and/or 
removed, overwriting existing ones (Could just call it from the Xsession 
script or what have you)

For those interested, I also fiddled with the shutdown thing 
(xfce4-shutdown?) to do an "rsh HOST shutdown -p" to the host in DISPLAY 
variable.  Quite handy.  Other than that, it was surprisingly simple to 
get everything running as expected for remote xfce sessions.  The only 
other bit I would like to have that isn't in there is eSound support for 
the mixer applet...