My old mother on ubuntu gnome lose .desktop files

Question

I live far away from my mother. When her old laptop on windows XP died, I replaced it by a minicomputer with ubuntu gnome (14.04) that I remotely administer (ssh, x11vnc and rsync for backups). As old windows xp users, she has many icons on her desktop. I have created some launchers (firefox.desktop, thunderbird.desktop, Word.desktop (for libre office writer)).

Regularly, she calls me because one of these launchers has disappeared. Each time I find the missing launcher in the trash folder. Probably a mistake of my mother.

How would you protect these launchers while leaving write permission to Desktop folder ? Should I write a cron to monitor these mistakes ?

One idea is to put the sticky bit on the desktop folder and change the owner of the folder and .desktop files to root. Are there nasty side effects to be expected ?

Answer 1

chmod is not an assistant: if there are write permissions to the directory, then even chmod 000 will not save from deletion. You can help chattr +i on the file. Then even the root will not be able to delete the file until it removes this attribute (chattr -i).