[OLPC Security] [ANN] Rainbow 0.7.4

[Michael Stone]

Dear everyone:

At long last, I have a new release of Rainbow [1] prepared for you
which, along with recent changes in Sugar, should go a long way toward
resolving the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that you have
worked hard over the last three days to document for me. 

Notable changes include:

  Relaxed multimedia device permissions that should make it possible for
  activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers (though the
  speakers may still be muted - has erikos' recent fix for this issue
  landed?)

  Availability of the user's public key which should fix the problem
  that causes Record-38 to crash.

  Activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
  $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT. This should allow Clock-3 to launch.

  The ability to run activities under 'strace' to gather detailed
  information that can explain why an operation is failing when the
  activity itself does not yield enough information to diagnose the
  problem. This option can be enabled by defining the environment
  variable 'RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG' in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in
  /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py.

  More detailed tracebacks in Rainbow proper, courtesy of IPython. To
  view these tracebacks, view your activity's log file with 'less -R',
  e.g.

    less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log

I look forward to seeing what other issues you will turn up for me to
examine next. :)

Michael

P.S. - I'd like to extend special thanks, in this release note, to
Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their warmth and for the extraordinary
effort they have exerted in the past few days trying to make this
feature a reality. 

We aren't done yet, but without these folks' hard work, we would never
have taken even this first tentative step toward making a computer that
allows its users to take responsibility for safe-guarding their own
digital experience at whatever rate _they_ see fit rather than at a rate
imposed on them by exigency or by ill-fitting design.

Links:

[1] - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221