USB permissions for educational robots

[Paul Fox]

forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:
 > Andres Aguirre wrote:
 > > Here in uruguay xo`s are distributed with no permission to
 > > install rpm or modify udev rules, so is very important to have
 > > this rules added to work with butiá 2.0 and nxt in a near
 > > future.
 > 
 > fyi 
 > The Arduino IDE seems to need to run as root to see Arduino boards
 > http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/01/arduino-and-xo-laptop.html
 > 
 > (though it would be hard to install the IDE without being root)
 > 
 > might be relevant
 > 
 > Tony

so, that's yet another another request for more open
permissions on USB devices plugged in to the laptop.

last time this came up, i wrote:
 > we can add it, but clearly it would be best if deployments or even
 > local classrooms could add new device capabilities on their own.
 > because as soon as we say "great, we're done", someone will create
 > a new USB device that kids and teachers everywhere will want to use.
 > 
 > i would greatly appreciate someone coming up with a scheme to allow
 > the end-user, or a deployment, to add devices on their own.
 > 
 > perhaps the user should be given r/w permission for any USB device.
 > (yes, i understand there are big risks with that.  feel free to
 > propose exceptions that would make this safe.)

i would like to propose giving user-level read/write access to any
USB device which isn't an auto-mounted filesystem.  perhaps an easier
rule would be, any non-storage USB device.

can anyone think of reasons that this would be unacceptable?  (i assume,
but don't know, that this would not be hard to implement.

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