[Sugar-devel] Permission problems and accessing usb dispositive

[Paul Fox]

james wrote:
 > Alberto,
 > 
 > Sugar Activities are restricted in what they can do by design.  It
 > would be better if you could make your Activity work within Sugar's
 > restrictions.
 > 
 > One thing that might work is to make a Journal entry out of your
 > compiled code, with a suitable MIME type if there is one.  That way
 > you can use the Journal to copy the code to the USB-attached device.
 > 
 > James Simmons
 > 
 > 
 > > Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:03:58 -0300
 > > From: Alberto Arruda de Oliveira <alberto.a.oliv at gmail.com>
 > > Subject: [Sugar-devel]  Permission problems and acessing usb
 > >        dispositive
 > > To: sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
 > > Message-ID:
 > >        <AANLkTikvdXsZmt8le1GzKQNb4I7jOWzlNmUjNV7ZTO11 at mail.gmail.com>
 > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
 > >
 > > Hello again,
 > >
 > > First of all, I'd like to thank everyone that helped me on my other thread,
 > > about adapting a software to run as an activity on XO. Thanks to you all, I
 > > was able to do it.
 > >
 > > But now, I'm facing another problem regarding the permissions olpc user has
 > > to access diferent dispositives on XO. The software I adapted uses the USB
 > > port to communicate with an external module, to which it will send a
 > > compiled code. It's an graphical programming tool, with the purpose of
 > > robotics teaching. The problem is, since OLPC user doesn't have enough
 > > permissions to access the ports, we can't send the compiled code to the
 > > external module, unless we manually change the permissions to do so. So, my
 > > question is, is there any way to do it without having to do it manually for
 > > every machine we install or activity in ?

this has come up before, for the Scratch activity:

in the XO-1 case, the trick was for Scratch to add the
line "use-serial" to activity/permissions.info.  this tells
rainbow that this activity can access serial ports.  see:
    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles#activity.2Fpermissions.info

in the XO-1.5 case, making user "olpc" a member of group
"dialout" was the answer.  USB serial devices are already
accessible by that group (though i can't at the moment find what
makes that happen), so this made everything okay.

if the "use-serial" trick isn't appropriate on XO-1 anymore, then
we could make user olpc a member of group uucp, if that's what you
say is needed, but that will only help on future s/w builds.

in particular, see the "use-serial" option.  this is already in use by
Scratch, for access to USB serial modules.  (i assume you module is
a serial device, given its uucp ownership.)

we really need to figure out how to make this problem more painless.
it came up the other day in the context of a new Lego peripheral that's
been integrated with Scratch.  in this case the peripheral appears
as a HID device, and it's a bigger leap to simply make all HID devices
accessible to any user.

paul

 > >
 > > Just in case, the device our activity is trying to access is
 > >
 > > /dev/ttyACM0
 > >
 > > Using ls -l /dev/ttyACM0 we see that the its access permission is uucp while
 > > the group of our activity is olpc.
 > >
 > > Using chmod o=rw /dev/ttyACM0 solves the problem.
 > >
 > > Thanks again
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 > Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
 > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel

=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org