how to change default launcher icons in unity for a new user?

Question

I have customised my Unity launcher's icon list with custom launchers . Now I want the same customised launcher to appear when i create a new user. Currently the default ubuntu launcher appears when I create a new user. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Ok, after googling around I found the answer. It's quite simple. The answer is a combination of the two answers above plus a few more. Open a Terminal and type the following command:

sudo cp -rf .config/ .gconf/ .gconfd/ .gnome2/ /etc/skel/

That's it. Now all the changes will appear for the new user. This worked for me. I tested the changes by creating a new user.

Note that this will not change the launchers for already existing users, just for newly created users.

Answer 2

First, get your 'favorites' list:

$ gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites

The output should be like this:

['ubiquity-gtkui.desktop', 'nautilus-home.desktop', 'firefox.desktop', 'libreoffice-writer.desktop', 'libreoffice-calc.desktop', 'libreoffice-impress.desktop', 'ubuntu-software-center.desktop', 'ubuntuone-installer.desktop', 'gnome-control-center.desktop']

Now open /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/com.canonical.Unity.gschema.xml file for edit, find schema with id="com.canonical.Unity.Launcher" and replace the <default> value of <key type="as" name="favorites"> with your custom settings from the first step.

Answer 3

This is a speculative guess...

I believe the adduser command is launched when creating a new user. It creates a new user home folder using the contents in /etc/skel

if you run a ls -al /etc/skel you'll notice that there is a very basic folder structure.

Try creating a .local/share/applications folder in /etc/skel. Then copy the contents of your .local/share/applications folder to /etc/skel/.local/share/applications

Answer 4

The favourites list is managed by a dconf entry. I'm no bash expert, but I believe if you add a command in the adduser file in /etc/skel to add the favourites list you have, then it should work for every new user.

Sorry I can't really get it more technical yet (I will try to improve my answer).