[Sugar-devel] Enhancing Sugar to support multiple users

[Simon Schampijer]

On 09/06/2010 03:05 PM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> On 5 September 2010 13:57, Christoph Derndorfer
> <christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just created a new ticket (http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2292) to get
>> some discussions started on what changes need to be made to Sugar to work
>> well in an environment where multiple users will work on the same machine
>> (which is how Peru's next 300,000 XOs will be used:
>> http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/peru/peru_between_one_laptop_per_child_and_seven_children_per_laptop.html).
>>
>> Obviously this touches upon a lot of areas from simple naming of the
>> machine, over the Journal, backups and probably a whole host of other issues
>> that I haven't though of yet.
>
> When we discussed this while I was in Peru, one requirement they
> identified is that the kid would log onto an XO one day and do some
> work, and then log onto another XO the following week and continue the
> same work.
>
> Assuming this still stands, this strongly calls for a network-based
> home directory system with some kind of network login service (but
> someone with experience in such areas should comment). This would
> require a number of changes at the OS level and server level, but
> Sugar would be left untouched, as far as I can think.
>
> Daniel

So this is basically what I did in my pilot [1]. I used F11, 0.84 on 
regular laptops and an Xserve that was already handling LDAP and NFS. 
The changes you need to make on the machines to point to the Server are 
minimal, Sugar itself stays untouched. And yes you need some login manager.

Regards,
    Simon

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Planetarium/en