non-Sugar but core software?

[Michael Stone]

Jani,

Adapting Rainbow (the activity isolation component) to work on regular
linux systems is an interesting challenge that I'd love to discuss with
you.

At present, there are three or so issues that would need to be overcome:

  First, magic numbers. The rainbow codebase hardcodes some magic
  numbers and strings that would need to be broken out and made
  configurable.

  Second, dbus configuration. Most standard dbus configurations create
  session buses which accept connections from exactly one uid. This is
  totally incompatible with the security model that we're implementing.
  Fortunately, the session bus config file makes this option somewhat
  configurable. Unfortunately, being a single-user system, it was most
  expedient to simply disable the check entirely than to work out a more
  reasonable setting. Therefore, if we wish to support multi-user
  systems, some work will need to be done to make the session bus play
  nicely with Rainbow. Some more work might need to be done to allow
  per-human-operator state in rainbow itself.

  Finally, there's some work that should probably be done to finish a
  rainbow nss module since it probably conflicts will all sorts of
  distro guidelines to write software that wantonly writes to
  /etc/passwd and /etc/group every time you use it to launch an
  activity.

All this being said, Rainbow can definitely be adapted to the standard
linux desktop environment and I am very excited about performing that
adaptation (time permitting) because I know that I've often wanted
something like Rainbow around when I'm trying out software from sources
that I don't fully trust.

Thoughts?

Michael





On Sat, Jan 12, 2008 at 04:24:45PM +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> which software besides Sugar and the activities are XO independent and 
> would make sense to be packaged and run in emulators or normal PCs?
> I see there are various projects with olpc in their name - olpc-utils,
> olpc-content, then there's the security infrastructure.
> I'd appreciate any suggestions as to what to package after the Sugar 
> pieces are done.
> 
> thank you
> Jani
> 
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