[Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Read ETexts-19

[James Simmons]

Tomeu,

Thanks, that clears up a lot.  It does remind me that in Windows you
can replace the default graphical shell with something else.  The
Activity I plan to put together should be useful even if it can't do
everything the Journal can do.  (Just being able to copy any file into
the Journal would be useful to me).  Still, it would be nice, for
instance, to be able to use Aleksey's Library 2 as a replacement
Journal Activity.  If you had to open the Terminal and modify some
Python code to do that it would be OK.  I wouldn't expect it to be
easy.  Maybe you could create something like Library 2 as a normal
Activity with limited functionality (for instance on loading it might
try to write to a directory that is forbidden to Activities and if it
could not some functions would remain hidden).  If you used it as a
replacement Journal Activity it could do more.

Reading about the children who were excited about GNOME on the XO I
too think it would be nice to be able to customize and personalize
Sugar a bit.  I think the idea fits in with the "Low floor, no
ceiling" goal of the project.

James Simmons


On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 4:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 23:08, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sascha,
>>
>> I was looking at the code for Leer Pen Drive and thinking how I could
>> improve on it, and in the process I ended up looking at
>> git.sugarlabs.org at the code for Journal.  Apparently that is not the
>> most recent code, but I was a bit surprised that Journal inherits from
>> Activity.  That wouldn't be too surprising except that the Journal
>> Activity can write to a USB or thumb drive.  I couldn't figure out how
>> or even where it was doing it, but it does seem that you could write
>> an Activity that does everything the Journal does, from writing to
>> mounted media to unmounting it.
>>
>> How is that possible?  My guess: like everything else I don't fully
>> understand about Sugar, it has something to do with DBus.
>>
>> If anyone could point me to something that might help my understanding
>> I'd appreciate it.
>
> Hi James,
>
> the journal shares with activities some code, but is activated
> differently. It runs inside the shell process instead of being run as
> a separate process inside a rainbow sandbox, and this is why it can do
> things that other activities cannot.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Sascha Silbe
>> <sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 07:55:59PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>>>
>>>> It would be nice if one of the things Activities were allowed to write
>>>> to was external drives mounted on /media.
>>>
>>> The only thing that might prevent that is Rainbow, which isn't installed by
>>> default on any system running > 0.82 that I know of (and in 0.82-using OLPC
>>> builds it's supposed to allow access to /media [1]). So while you cannot
>>> depend on it, it will work fine in most cases in the near future.
>>>
>>>> That would enable anyone to put together a Journal-like Activity and yet
>>>> would probably not do too much harm securitywise.
>>>
>>> I have to disagree, access to /media/* is equally sensitive as access to the
>>> data store. It's even so similar that we might use the same set of
>>> permissions for both.
>>>
>>> FTR: Rainbow currently doesn't do anything special for /media. Sugar (or
>>> probably the Gnome parts it's based on) mounts FAT filesystems in /media
>>> with dmask=0077, thereby denying access to anyone but the primary user. In
>>> combination this means access to /media/* is denied to activities running on
>>> recent Sugar and Rainbow.
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>