NAME

ubuntu-defaults-template - create skeleton defaults customization package

SYNOPSIS

ubuntu-defaults-template [ --quiet ] packagename

DESCRIPTION

The ubuntu-defaults-builder project allows you to easily create a "default settings" package for Ubuntu and then build a customized image with it. The main purpose for this is to provide a standard and safe way to create localized Ubuntu images, or OEM custom projects.

The ubuntu-defaults-template script will generate a source package with the customizable settings (e. g. desktop/background.jpg and webbrowser/bookmarks-menu.txt). When built and installed, it will take the necessary actions to modify the system-wide defaults for desktops, programs, etc.

The first step is to call ubuntu-defaults-template with the target package name as an argument, for example "ubuntu-defaults-french" or "mockbuntu-default-settings". This will create a source package with the given name in the current directory, with a set of (disabled) example configuration files, and a standard debian/ packaging (using mostly dh_ubuntu_defaults).

Then you customize the individual configuration files like webbrowser/bookmarks-menu.txt or unity/launchers.txt to your needs, and then run dpkg-buildpackage(1) to build the source and binary packages. Once you install the generated .deb, new users will from then on use the new default settings.

After you have done this, you can build installation images using ubuntu-defaults-image(1).

CONFIGURATION

At present you can change the following defaults:

Desktop background image (desktop/background.jpg)
Additional .desktop files (desktop/*.desktop, particularly useful to provide launchers for web applications)
Default desktop session in login managers (desktop/default-session.txt) Supports LightDM and GDM right now.
Default applications (desktop/default-applications.txt)
Webbrowser start page (webbrowser/startpage.txt)
Additional Webbrowser bookmarks in the Menu and in the Toolbar (webbrowser/bookmarks-menu.txt and webbrowser/bookmarks-toolbar.txt)
Webbrowser default search engine (webbrowser/searchengine.txt)
Radio stations in Rhythmbox and Banshee (multimedia/radiostations.txt)
Additional launchers in Unity and Unity 2d (unity/launchers.txt).
Internationalization support (i18n/language.txt, i18n/langpacks.txt, i18n/keyboard.txt)
Additional icons (icons/, *.jpg, *.png, or *.svg, in the directory hierarchy given in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/)
Extra packages (depends.txt and recommends.txt)

Except for desktop/background.jpg, all configuration files are simple text files with one entry per line. Lines which start with '#' are ignored and can be used for comments. Each configuration file has comments which document the format and give some example entries.

MACROS

All configuration files can contain macro variables which will be expanded when building the defaults package. At present, these variables are known:

${distro_release_number} The release number of the Ubuntu release the package is built on. E. g. "11.04".
${distro_release_name} The release code name of the Ubuntu release the package is built on. E. g. "lucid".

Unknown variables will abort the package build, to avoid unexpected results.

EXAMPLE

You can run the /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-defaults-builder/examples/make-example to build an "defaults-builder-test" defaults package in the current directory, which will exercise all possible customizations by uncommenting the examples from the configuration files.

AUTHOR

ubuntu-defaults-builder is developed by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@ubuntu.com>.