Defining Desktop user types

Defining Desktop user types

You may need to support users that have differing UNIX experience levels, or otherwise configure the Desktop for a variety of user types. The Desktop provides a ``user type'' mechanism to allow you to do this.

All user type configuration files are kept within the main Desktop rules directory, /usr/lib/X11/IXI/XDesktop/rules. Each user type has its own subdirectory with name UserType.user, for example SCO.user.

A user type directory must contain a file called Rule.dr, which holds the default rules for this user type. The Rule.dr file can read and manipulate any files it needs to. For example, within the SCO.user user type directory, you may find the following:

Rule.dr: the main rule file for this user type, which is treated as if it were part of the system rule file
menus.dr: a rule file used to set up all the menus for this user type
Main.dt: the file used for the default main Desktop for each user of this type
objects: a subdirectory containing the objects used by default for each user of this type
ll_TT.prf: The default preferences file for this user type, in the language ll_TT, where ll is a two-character code for the language (as defined by the ISO 639 standard) and TT is a two-character code for the territory (as defined by the ISO 3166 standard). By default, the SCO.user user type provides the en_US.prf file.
ll_TT: The language file containing all the text strings used for this user type, in the form of Deskshell variable assignments. The rules of the user type should refer to the variable names to determine what text to display.