Onboard

Disable the settings dialog and tray icon menu

Asked by Jakob Schöttl

I want to use onboard in a custom restricted desktop environment on a control panel for a medical device. The desktop environment's window manager is xmonad.

The enduser should not be able to open additional windows (like onboard's help system) and should in particular not be able to change onboard's settings.

Is there a way to disable

- the settings dialog, and
- the tray icon's menu?

Or is it only possible by changing the source and compile onboard on my device?

I could also write some window manager rules that close the help and settings dialog immediately.

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Francesco Fumanti (frafu) said : 		#1

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Onboard.

There is an option in Onboard's settings to enable/disable the tray icon. You can find it in the "General" section of Onboard's settings and it is named "Show status icon".

Concerning the settings dialog: It should not be necessary to recompile Onboard; you can do it also after the installation of Onboard.
- You will probably want to delete the onboard-settings.desktop file.
- You will probably want to remove the settings button from the layout.

Explanation about how to remove the settings button from a layout, based on the Compact layout shipping by default with Onboard:

A layout is defined by an xml file with the .onboard extension, in our example Compact.onboard, and several svg files. The xml file defines the buttons and their function in the layout, while the svg files define the shapes of the buttons on the layout. To remove the settings button from the Compact layout, you simply need to comment it out in the xml file.

In our example, open the Compact.onboard file in a text editor, look for the key with "settings" as "id" and comment out the whole key tag. In other words, turn
<key id='settings' group='bottomrow' scan_priority="1"/>
into
<!-- <key id='settings' group='bottomrow' scan_priority="1"/> -->

Of course, if you want to do something more clean, you can perform the changes in the source of Onboard before installing it.

Hoping to have been helpful,

Francesco

@marmuta, main Onboard developer:

If you know any better solution, please improve the reply.

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Jakob Schöttl (jakob190590) said : 		#2

Thank you, Francesco, for the detailed explanation!
That should totally solve my issue.

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marmuta (marmuta) said : 		#3

There is an easier way to disable access to preferences:
gsettings set org.onboard.lockdown disable-preferences true

There are other lockdown options too. Have a look in dconf-editor, at org.onboard.lockdown.

There is no dedicated lockdown option to disable help, though. You would have to keep status icon and floating icon (has a context menu on right click) off in preferences.

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Jakob Schöttl (jakob190590) said : 		#4

Thank you, marmuta, that is very useful!