If you have an account here
We have many different kinds of computers. We try to create a uniform environment on all unix-machines, all apple-os and all windows machines (that's three environments not one, we don't try to do the impossible). The general policy is to make local motifications default, while keeping other options available. I.e. we recommend that you login and use our Xdaimi setup on our Unix machines. If for some reason you want to use Gnome you can do it, but the level of support is limited.
We have provided a way for you to customize your login in a safe manner that will survive changes in the system setup. However most of our users are perfectly happy with the standard setup, so there is no need to experiment with this, unless you know what you want to do and how to do it.
Our unix-machines are general purpose work-stations. When you sit down in front of one of them and login, you can expect to have the full power of the machine at your disposal. You are not allowed to reboot or shutdown the machine though since others might depend on it.
Some of our machines run Windows. They are under control of a W2K-server, which stores their user setup, provides printing facilities etc. We synchronize passwords, printer settings, files etc with the Unix-systems.
Most of our office machines used by the administration here are Apple computers, running MacOs 9 or MacOS X. You can connect to the rest of our systems from these computers and printing etc is similar to the rest of the systems.