Sabayon and Unity Interface

[Rippl, Steve]

Hi Jonathon,

Thanks for the swift and positive response... see below/inline for my reply...

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)
<jonathan at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Steve
>
> On 31/05/11 01:04 PM, Rippl, Steve wrote:
> > There's a thread running at the moment about current versions of
> > Ubuntu/Edubuntu and their respective support for things, but I'm
> > specifically interested in (concerned about) the new Unity UI and the
> > profile lockdown tool Sabayon in future LTS versions.
>
> Where is this thread if I may ask?


https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2011-May/006725.html


>
> > We've been running pure thin clients (no local apps) in our school district
> > for a few years now and things are working really very well.  A key part to
> > it is the fact that Sabayon has worked properly recently.  We're currently
> > on 10.04 and haven't tested anything later than that yet, but a brief Google
> > does show up bugs filed against Sabayon to say it isn't working with Unity.
> >  Now I know that currently you can revert back to the regular Gnome 2, but
> > what's the direction for 12.04 and 14.04, I don't imagine Gnome 2 will
> > continue to be around for ever?!  Is there a commitment in the Edubuntu team
> > to keep Sabayon working as well as it does now (in 10.04)?  We really rely
> > on it!
>
> The Gnome 2 series has been abandoned upstream, so it is indeed going
> away in future releases, which pretty much leaves Gnome 3 and Unity for
> the gnome-based desktops (how 'gnomey' unity is is debatable, but that's
> another discussion entirely).
>
> If Unity and Gnome 3 has lock down features configurable through
> gconf/dcond/gsettings/etc, then it shouldn't be too hard getting it into
> Sabayon. Unity upstream is quite responsive to bug reports, so a good
> exercise would be to check what can actually be locked down in Unity
> currently and file bugs for the things that can't. In it's current state
> (which is probably more of a bug than a feature) Unity isn't very
> customizable anyway. It would also be nice to know the most important
> features you use in Sabayon. Not sure how great xnest/xephyr/etc will
> work with Unity 3D, but also worth testing.


The main focus for us is to simplify the interface for the students,
removing as many of the non-essential menu items, configuration
options, system settings etc etc.  We don't necessarily want to
uninstall them all, so having control of the menu and being able to
lock it is great.  <defensiveness> We don't do this to be mean, it's
just that given a button to press kids will press it, so we're simply
trying to keep them on task and stop them attempting to break their
desktop or wasting their teachers time.  I'm sure some out there won't
agree with this approach, but with almost 1,000 computers in the
District this works for us </defensiveness>

So menu editing, hiding as much of the system/desktop configuration
settings as possible etc is our main use of Sabayon.  We check the
various other boxes to disallow access to the command line etc, but
these don't work fully without some additional hacks.  The Epiphany
stuff in Sabayon is pretty meaningless to us as we use Firefox.
Anyway, it's summer for us soon too so we'll do some serious testing
of it with 11.04 then and start filing the relevant bugs/feature
requests then...


>
> From the Edubuntu development team we can't really make a hard
> commitment, but we take feedback from the community very seriously
> (pretty much everything we've been working on the last 2 years have been
> based exclusively on user requests) and it's early in the development
> cycle so we can at least put priority to it and make some noise about it
> and even hopefully get some people excited about it and get them to
> contribute to it.


Well that does come across in that as I said things really are working
very well for us right now, thanks for what you do!


>
> Otherwise, thanks for your e-mail, the feedback is greatly appreciated!
>
> -Jonathan
>
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--
Steve Rippl
Technology Director
Woodland Public Schools
360 841 2730