Boot LookAt and AddToApps on multi user systems

[Alan]

I've been pointed at the documentation for adding things to be looked at on startup of RISC OS. This states it goes into <Choices$Write>.Boot.Desktop in a particular section and this seems OK.

I assume this works equally for multi-user RISC OS systems. Does anyone know if there was the equivalent of an all users version of this in the same way as there is for the TasksToBeLoaded?

I'm considering allowing this to be set when installed in PackMan and my thinking is that if you install an application, and want it to be looked at, you probably want it to be looked at for all users. If people disagree with this, please say.

I would hope that the current look at screens would then let user add and remove things for just themselves or all users, but not having a multi-user RISC OS system I have no idea what it provides.

Thanks,
Alan

[Theo Markettos]

Alan <alan...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I've been pointed at the documentation for adding things to be looked at
> on startup of RISC OS. This states it goes into
> <Choices$Write>.Boot.Desktop in a particular section and this seems OK.
>
> I assume this works equally for multi-user RISC OS systems. Does anyone
> know if there was the equivalent of an all users version of this in the
> same way as there is for the TasksToBeLoaded?

There is... there's !Boot.Choices.Hardware for machine-related things - see
my hardware profiles guide here:
http://www.drobe.co.uk/features/artifact1252.html
This is liable to move about when podules are (un)plugged, so might not be a
good fit.

I think there's another all-users part of the Select choices tree, but I
don't remember the details. I'm sure there's a webpage describing it, but I
can't find it. Though there's a bit here:
http://gerph.org/riscos/ramble/configuration.html#Bootsequence_ChangingChoices

Theo

[Martin Bazley]

The following bytes were arranged on 1 May 2013 by Alan :

> I've been pointed at the documentation for adding things to be looked
> at on startup of RISC OS. This states it goes into
> <Choices$Write>.Boot.Desktop in a particular section and this seems
> OK.
>
> I assume this works equally for multi-user RISC OS systems. Does
> anyone know if there was the equivalent of an all users version of
> this in the same way as there is for the TasksToBeLoaded?

The ROL Choices tree has a subdirectory 'Default', which has the lowest
priority in Choices$Path, a subdirectory called 'Users' which in turn
contains one subdirectory per defined username, which has the highest
priority, and a subdirectory called 'Hardware', which I don't think
anybody uses.

In practice just about everything (because it's the value of
Choices$Write) goes inside 'Users', even if multi-user support is
disabled (in which case there is one user, and its name is 'Single').
My 'Default' directory is completely empty, but you can in theory access
it with the (defined only in the ROL fork) variable ChoicesDefault$Dir.

I'd advise against it, though. Part of the whole point of showing a
login screen before bootup is to enable the bootup sequence to be
customised, in which case it's entirely likely that users don't *want*
changes to BootBoot, BootRun and BootApps to be blanket-applied to all
other users. (Consider the potential carnage where one user uses
StrongED, and the other uses Zap, both of which claim the text filetype
upon booting...)

Given that the package database is held in Resources and I assume isn't
likely to move, installation is a global act anyway, so there's no
potential for conflict between users there. If more than one user wants
the same application looked at or run, I'm sure the existing Boot
Configure plugin will suffice.

--
__<^>__ Red sky in the morning: Shepherd's warning
/ _ _ \ Red sky at night: Shepherd's delight
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\_> <_/ ======================= Martin Bazley ==========================