Escape to Fedora (gnome-session)

[CarolineM]

One of our goals with SoaS is to have middle and high school users test our software as community service and learn about open source. It would be very cool if there was a backdoor, a command in the terminal or an activity that was downloaded that would let them get into the standard Fedora desktop.

[marcopg]

The easier implementation would be to use GDM as login manager. At startup you would be presented with a login screen (logins automatically after N seconds) and you could choose from a pulldown at the bottom Sugar or GNOME (choice is remembered). Side effects are bigger image size and higher memory usage.

How does this sound? Should this be another kind of soas image so that we can keep the sugar-only one for lower memory systems?

[CarolineM]

hmm,maybe as a short term work around.

Fundementally we want it to follow the "Low Floor, High Ceiling". We want it to be really really easy and clean to start with, no confusing questions for the first time user, but we want no limit as to where they can go with it. And to me no limit means they can get into a standard Linux view and do anything they can do with a Linux machine.

Getting there for the advanced user doesn't have to be easy. We can require them to go to a wiki page and follow complex instructions. But I really don't want to give a first time user a question they have to answer.

[marcopg]

Ah. A trivial-to-implement alternative would be a command line utility which switches between Sugar and GNOME. Or, with some more work, we could have a control panel page to do the same.

With this approach we would increase image size, but not memory usage. So I'm not sure if we would need two kind of images or not.

[CarolineM]

I like the command line utility.

Overall for Sugar on a Stick, I'm not sure if its worth pushing for fitting everything plus storage onto 1GB or if we should just go for 2GB drives. I don;t think we are ready to make that decision yet.

For the middle/high school student testers I think requiring 2 GB drives, or having it fit in 1GB without much space for student work is ok.

[mungewell]

Personally my feelings are that SOAS should be the absolute minimum disk size, the reason for this is that not all areas have good connectivity and even downloading a few hundred MBytes can be a problem.

If it is installed on a USB with large enough peristance file/partition, is there any reason the Fedora equivilant of 'sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop' wouldn't work?

GDM itself has a pretty low footprint so that that would (IMHO) be OK, however jumping out of X to GDM causes the problem of system user names (LiveCD/USB normally has a fixed one for first user).

With a compress LiveCD filesystem (such as Casper) we should be able to fit an awful lot onto a 512MByte or 1GByte USB key.

Simon.

[marcopg]

gdm has actually a pretty big footprint in the latest versions, it brings in a *lot* of gnome dependencies. yum install something would work, if we want to go down that way but it's a long download and it might be annoying for Caroline high school students. In the end I suspect we will different soas spins customized for a certain deployment anyway.

I'm not trying to optimize size yet, even for previous the sugar only spins. It seem like that's something we can do on demand, when required by the deployments.

[marcopg]

Caroline, is soas-5 good enough in this regard? Anything else you want to see before closing this ticket?

[CarolineM]

Can you give me step by step instructions for how I can use the terminal to get to GNOME? I will test and document.

Thanks!

[marcopg]

Oh, you probably missed my mail about this. Pasting it here:

The way you switch right now is:

Open a terminal, type the following and logout/reboot:

echo gnome-session > .Xclients

To switch back:

echo sugar > .Xclients

I could make it "switch-desktop gnome", "switch-desktop sugar", if
that's better. (and print a message about rebooting from there).

[CarolineM]

Works! Please review this page: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_as_Service_Learning

[FGrose]

The .Xclients change does not work in Soas-200902201251.iso; only returns to liveuser login.

Please also explain the blocking feature for interested consumers.

[sdz]

Well, there're probably some things which need to be explained here: The upcoming release of SoaS won't include the GNOME desktop environment, since it would significantly increase the size of the image and we're going to focus on Sugar here. This is of course also the reason why one won't be able to use some gnome-session magic, either. Closing this ticket for now.

On the other hand, you might be interested in the Fedora Education Spin: It includes the XFCE desktop environment and additional educational apps (such as KDE Edu), as well as a showcase of the Sugar desktop. It will be officially released with F11, but will also have preview releases (e.g. with F11 Beta) in the meantime. ​http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Education_Spin

[sascha_silbe]

Bulk change distribution=SoaS -> component=SoaS