[OLPC-AU] Network and some further Q's

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 28 September 2010 12:09, Jonathan Nalder <jnald2 at eq.edu.au> wrote:
> Ta guys. Sridhar has there been any cases you know of from the NT or
> elsewhere of kids doing much deleting etc yet?

Not in Australia, and I haven't heard of problems happening elsewhere
either. It is a known risk, and planning is underway to mitigate this.

Sugar was designed to prevent this sort of thing, but GNOME is a
standard desktop environment and so does not have those safeguards.

You could set a root password on the XOs to prevent kids using su, if
you really wanted. I think it's far better to let the children learn
from their mistakes, then provide a means for them to quickly recover
through re-imaging.

> These are just all the questions I'll get asked re: management rights. Is
> there an easy (ie. busy classroom teacher easy) method to do the re-imaging
> then?

It's not hard, and I'm sure a teacher could manage this with a little
instruction. Each class should have a USB drive with an XO image file
on it. Insert the stick, turn on the XO and type a single command into
the OpenFirmware prompt.

> I'm assuming tho that with no XS backups in place, a deleted journal would
> be lost for good.

You can back up the journal to USB drives. The Backup and Restore
activities I linked to on this list earlier should make this easy.

Sridhar