User Template Shenanigans

[tristan_mason]

Hi All

I have some files I need to put in the User Template folder to facilitate various settings and preferences. I have plists and prefs files for apps that greatly enhance the user customisation. I’m looking for best practice regarding this. Should I package them all up in a single pkg and put it in the build train? Use the copy command in the firstboot sequence? Other?

As always any assistance greatly appreciated.

Tristan

[Allister Banks]

Hey Tristan,
Best practice, maintenance-wise, would be MCX. Anything not already templated in WGM can often be added by making your own manifest, as described in Mr. Marczak and Neagle’s book. Last resort could be loginhooks so you could specify them per user/group, if you need to be that granular. Don’t use them much myself, but checkout [url]https://github.com/unixorn/osxtoolkit[/url]
I can tell you, because I am still too lazy to convert things to the right way myself, that the worst method is shoving plist files into the corresponding directories. defaults write scripts are probably less bad, but may lose certain abilities in 10.7 (plistbuddy should stick around).

[tristan_mason]

point taken. back at work now and am looking to use WGM to take care of the preferences. I’ll use instadmg to make and bake, deploy to, well deploy and WGM to customise the user experience then freeze it with deepfreeze.

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