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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 15:50, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I know the intention is good, but whatever we decide should take into
account deployability, because Sugar is of no use until it is deployed
somehow.

Regards,

Tomeu

> 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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>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>
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