Program to address teacher's need of managing student users' permissions

[David Groos]

Hi Nestor,

Thanks for your reply and encouragement.  So you understand about the 22yo
blond w/ limited coverage used as desktop background ;-)

As I understand, Pessulus is a component program to Sabayon and is for
locking down GNOME for a generic user.  Can you use Pessulus features
assigned to a group, then assign users to that group?. Unfortunately Sabayon
doesn't work on Hardy (unless bugs were squashed w/in the last couple of
weeks?).

These thin clients don't have a hard drive--only booting edubuntu.  They
will e-mail themselves things from other computers/OSes I'm sure.  Would the
scanning be to prevent viruses on edubuntu or on the other OS?

The idea of the script is to say create a group called 'firefox', then go to
the firefox program, set group ownership to the group, 'firefox', then, set
permissions so that group (firefox) can execute the program but 'others'
have no permission.  Then, one can assign students to the group, 'firefox'
or remove them from that group as necessary.

David

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Néstor <nestorac at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> you can try Pessulus, I use it on a server&desktop for people not to
> turn it off "by accident". And I think that Sabayon should also work
> at least in Ubuntu Hardy.
>
> A script is not a bad idea, but it's not very fine grained. Anyways,
> there's no easy way to defend people from themselves: someone can just
> manage to get a 22yo blonde girl on the computer background given
> enough time. But this can also be challenging!!
>
> I would give people the possiblity of having an automatic scan on
> their homes for viruses with clamscan, just in case they share that
> information with computers with other OSes.
>
> I think you will enjoy your task, and do a lot of good to your community.
>
> Good luck with your project!! :-) Please, send any comments and I'll
> help if I can.
>
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:15 PM, David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I'm a teacher working to establish a thin client setup in my classroom
> which
> > upon success will be immediately replicated in 2 other science
> classrooms.
> > While the district (Minneapolis Public Schools) is supporting my efforts,
> > they don't know Linux so I'm on my own--with you-all as back up!  My goal
> is
> > create a flexible hardware/software/pedagogical model that will be
> > replicated in all Minneapolis public schools and anyplace where the kids
> are
> > economically the neediest and of course anywhere else.  My blog
> > http://groosd.blogspot reports the tip of the iceberg of my efforts to
> get
> > this working.
> >
> > As a teacher properly manages computer user permissions in class,
> students
> > grow in responsible use of this resource.  While there are some students
> who
> > follow the rules when told, others like to explore and test limits.
>  Having
> > a process to manage what students can do on the computers and rewarding
> > students who use the resources responsibly, brings everyone together,
> > allowing for a creative, collaborative and hard working classroom of
> > adolescents.
> >
> > From what I've heard and read on line, there was an excellent GUI program
> > Sabayon which was designed to do just this.  Apparently this isn't being
> > maintained and it doesn't work in Hardy or Intrepid.  I've seen that some
> > including LaserJock have worked some on this lately but don't know of
> > status?
> >
> > Andreas Olsson and Jordan Mantha and others suggested making a simple
> script
> > to manage group permissions, a great way to solve this need.  Andreas
> said
> > he would write this script in PERL (his strength) as a proof of concept
> as
> > well as to meet my class' immediate need.  Comments? thoughts?
> >
> > Thanks for all of your work; it makes my work possible.
> >
> > David
> >
> > --
> > edubuntu-devel mailing list
> > edubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> > Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Néstor
> +34 687 96 74 81
> nestorac at gmail.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-devel/attachments/20090214/37529f04/attachment.html>