Suggestions for a school network

[paolodongilli]

First of all, thank you for developing autorandr.

We are managing many schools (74) - FUSS Project. In each school we have a network of Debian PCs (with Xfce as DE) connected to a Debian server where users' homes are stored. Teachers moving from one classroom to another rely on the configuration displays.xml produced by xfce4-display-settings which unfortunately doesn't treat PCs as unique pieces of hardware. Two PCs of the same make and model with two different video setups share the same configuration (!). This way users need very often to run xfce4-display-settings when they change classroom. We would be grateful for some suggestions/experiences on how to solve this situation with autorandr on a

• per machine base (before users log in)
• per user base (after users log in)

Thanks so much in advance and keep-up the good work!

[phillipberndt]

If the monitor models are somewhat standardized, then you can easily share configurations between machines. If user homes are network backed, then things should just work for users: A machine will automatically pick the preferred configuration a user has for the setup with these exact monitor models attached to each display port.

For the per-machine setup, I guess my approach would be to still have just one central repository of default settings (one for each monitor setup in existence, maybe per a site) and distribute that to each machine into the configuration directory in /etc. User configurations override the defaults.

Then the only thing you'd need to do in addition is to add some script that automatically opens a popup asking users whether they want to store their changes and using which profile name whenever they make changes using the window manager's tooling.

[phillipberndt]

One other thought: It should be somewhat straightforward to hack autorandr to generate the profile name from the EDIDs, and to rather than managing configurations itself just maintain a symlink from displays.xml to a setup-dependent file. If you do this once per session before the WM comes up (pam module? xinit?), users would have per-setup settings transparently.