[frusterbatedboi]

Hey Guys:

I have a question for you... and am looking for as much advice as you can give. I've toyed a bit in Automator and a bit in AppleScript and need some advice.

Basically, I need an easy way to apply a large amount of system settings. Specifically, here's what I need it to do:

assign a predetermined dotMac account name
turn the screensaver off
add a specific printer (it's one that's always there so Bonjour could find it)
adjust energy saver settings (and specific startup and shutdown times)
assign a predetermined Sharing name and turn on Remote Desktop access
set the timezone

Outside of the system preferences, I need to launch iChat and configure it with a specific first name and last name as well as a few other apps.

Any suggestions of where to start? All of these machines would be configured from the first time setup... I run these settings on 50 machines about once a month so any type of automation would be very helpful. Thanks!

[Mithras]

The simplest thing to do is to learn your way around Applescript GUI Scripting (it's pretty simple, really), and do everything with that. Rather than learning individually which settings there might be a command-line interface for or not.