[Sugar-devel] erasing the journal and config

[Sameer Verma]

I posed this question on OLPC Support Gang earlier and got responses
that its not possible to do so under bitfrost and rainbow.

===================
"Hello everybody,

We have a lending library at SFSU, ready to go, but we need to have a
way to erase the config and journal every time the XO comes back from
a borrower. The SFSU library staff have made it very clear that they
don't want the process to be "open the terminal and run a script". An
activity (say, Erase) would be quite desirable. Now, my skills with
making XO activities are near zero. Same goes for
python. I made a living way back as a developer, but haven't done so
in a long time. To add to my troubles, school just started, and I am
swamped with classes. My bottleneck is preventing the lending library
from going live.

So, here's my request. Can someone whip up an activity that does the following:

Opens the activity with one button labeled "Erase Configuration and
Journal" and a checkbox labeled "Shutdown XO after erasing".

The things that need to happen:

When the button is clicked:

rm  /home/olpc/.sugar/default/config
rm -rf /home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore
sudo shutdown -h now

I've tried this in bash and it works.

Any takers?

I'd imagine such an activity would be helpful for others running
lending libraries as well."

==========================

 The need to erase config and journal is more pressing on the
borrower's end - the borrower may not want to return the XO with her
journal entries on it. Of course, our library also likes to blank
machines before re-lending them out.

This makes me *very* curious. Shouldn't there be a way to erase the
configuration and journal without having to reflash the whole image?

cheers,
Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Information Systems
Director, Center for Business Solutions
San Francisco State University
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://cbs.sfsu.edu/
http://is.sfsu.edu/