To Gnome or not to Gnome

[Yioryos Asprobounitis]

--- On Thu, 3/25/10, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:

> From: Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
> Subject: Re: To Gnome or not to Gnome
> To: "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Yioryos Asprobounitis" <mavrothal at yahoo.com>, "Devel" <devel at lists.laptop.org>, "Fedora OLPC" <fedora-olpc-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010, 10:19 PM
> On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:33 -0300,
> Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> > More than protecting them, which is very hard or
> impossible, I'd add an
> > option to reset them to defaults without the need to
> reflash.
> 
> It just occurred to me that GNOME actually provides some
> ways to
> lock-down settings, useful for implementing kiosks or
> internet cafes.
> 
> Guess who wrote the documentation for it? I guess we
> already have the
> internal expertise :-)
> 
>    http://library.gnome.org/admin/deployment-guide/
> 
> Unfortunately, the only feature useful to us seems to be
> blocking the
> panel. It would be cool if Nautilus offered an option to
> prevent
> deleting dot files.
> 
> Perhaps the same could be achieved with ACLs? Or chattr -i?
> A smart and
> determined user could disable these mandatory protections,
> but we only
> need to make it fool-proof not hacker-proof!

I really think that the Gnome desktop is a valuable addition for the XO but mostly for the end user. Is not a coincidence that people use it. So openness and robustness should be implemented there too.
If the problem is the video driver for example, this is what it should be fixed, not hampering its use.
I can see blocking as a temp measure but only in combination with an increased gnome-bug-fixing priority.
Any user can mess-up its installation. Let's not forget that the usual "fixing" for sugar is... reflashing. But here we are talking bugs/inadequacies. Bug-fixing should be the way, instead of blocking features and Sugar-robustness claims.


> 
> -- 
>    // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
> 
>