enforce screensaver for all users of a system?

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 18:07 -0500, Matt Morgan wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:03:15 -0600, Ed Wilts <ewilts at ewilts.org> wrote:
> > Without thinking about it too hard, I'd create my own system-wide
> > .xscreensaver file.  Then, at user creation time, create a symlink to
> > the system version and make the symlink owned by root with no user write
> > access.  I obviously haven't tested this to prove that it works without
> > breaking anything either.
> 
> Thanks! I tried this and there's something I'm not getting. This all
> works except that when I run chmod on the symlink, nothing happens.
> That is, if as root I run
> 
> chmod 644 ~morganm/.xscreensaver
> 
> chmod doesn't complain, but nothing happens to the permissions on the
> symlink (which remain lrwxrwxrwx). At that point xscreensaver-demo
> can't edit the file (because the actual file is 644, root.root), but
> the user morganm can delete the symlink and create his own
> .xscreensaver. Is that normal? Symlinks have always confused me.

If you chown or chmod a symlink, you're applying the changes to the file
the link points to, not to the link itself.

One way of achieving the user-unconfigurability would be to rebuild the
xscreensaver package with a patch that removed the code that read
~/.xscreensaver. Long-winded but it would work.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>