How do I change the guest session defaults

Solution 1:

This has become much easier in 11.10.

First you need to create a folder: sudo mkdir -p /etc/guest-session/skel/. The -p switch creates /etc/guest-session so you can place /skel in it in one go. Now you just add the files you want to /etc/guest-session/skel and it will be copied onto the guest account whenever it's created.

The program that sets this up is /usr/sbin/guest-account in case you want to learn more about what's going on.

The tutorial CustomizeGuestSession elaborates on this topic. In particular it describes how you can create a "special purpose user" for a convenient way to customize the guest session appearance and behavior, without having to know which files to edit.

Solution 2:

The guest session is recreated every time as a "default new user" with the /usr/share/gdm/guest-session/guest-session-setup.sh script, which is part of the gdm-guest-session package. I don't see any clean way to make it include your settings into the guest session.

You could of course change the way every new user's $HOME gets created, but I'm not sure that's really what you want (I won't consider it a "clean" solution to do it that way).

Solution 3:

Not sure.. but I've always followed the steps on this post under sections login as guest where you can customize the account. Then section freeze it where you actually setup rsync to reset the account on PC startup. You can easily modify this to reset on logout or shutdown. Been working great for me.