[Sugar-devel] GNOME and protecting Sugar --
Martin Langhoff
martin.langhoff at gmail.com
Wed Jun 16 08:19:25 EDT 2010
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> During the last development cycle we lacked the time to lock-down GNOME
> a little more and we're still paying the consequences :-(
Ouch.
>> - Were there any other problems? Solutions?
>
> Indeed, some kids manage to do damage Sugar, with or without intention.
> More frequently, they mess up the panel icons in ways that make it
> difficult to restore functionality.
Mess up the panel icons in Sugar or in Gnome?
> In one case, a kid managed to click "Disable Networking" in nm-applet
> and then switch back to Sugar. Not "Disable Wireless", that would have
> been easy! It took me one hour of debugging to figure that out.
That would be in Gnome.
> Everyone, including teachers and teacher trainers, manages to fill up
> the filesystem with large multimedia files downloaded from the Internet,
> solowing down the system due to frequent jffs2 garbage collections.
That has nothing to do with Gnome.
> In some cases, it's not the user's fault: various programs, including
> Firefox and Browse, can hide up to 50MB of junk in dot-files. Clever
> users managed to discover some of these locations and passed the word.
Good to know. Still, not much to do with Gnome.
...
> To mitigate the problem:
>
> - lock down the panel:
>
> http://library.gnome.org/admin/deployment-guide/
>
> - add a "panic button" to olpc-configure which would bring up a
> text menu with various recovery functions, such as resetting
> GNOME configuration to its default and clearing temporary caches.
>
> - remove the desktop switcher icon from the Sugar control panel
> give the field technicians a secret shell command to restore it.
> This should prevent children who are too young to figure it out.
>
> - Hide the Activities. We can't really make them read-only or
> immutable because the updater runs as user olpc.
>
> - Also hide .sugar
Ok -- that's a good initial guide - thanks!
m
--
martin.langhoff at gmail.com
martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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