Running Linux Applications Under Sugar
Note: This article is about running standard GNU/Linux applications inside Sugar by using the Activities icon panel rather than starting them from the Terminal.
Sugar Coating
Many standard GNU/Linux programs can be run within Sugar, but without the collaboration and other Sugar integration programmed into them. The process of adding an icon to the Sugar Activities panel is called "Sugar Coating".
A simple script to automate the process was created by a woman named CatMoran. The script:
- has be confirmed to work with Firefox, Seamonkey, Midnight Commander, TuxType2, TuxPaint and Totem. It it presumed to work with many other GNU/Linux programs.
- only works with programs that use the same command every time (i.e., a single command with no qualifiers). It doesn't work for roto's current mplayer configuration, because the mplayer command requires an input file name to start the program.
To setup (one time):
- Start a Terminal activity.
- Enter the following commands: mkdir sugarize wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1203534/sugarize/libsugarize.so chmod 755 libsugarize.so wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1203534/sugarize/sug chmod 755 sug (What do those commands do? They log you in as root, gets a copy of Albert Cahalan's compiled libsugarize file, and gets the script CatMoran created, modified by akiwiguy.) Next, run this: vi sug and change the CREATEPATH variable to /home/$yourusernamehere/Activities Optional, if you want to use one of the icons CatMoran created: wget http://ia341002.us.archive.org/3/items/Sugarize/plain.svg wget http://ia341002.us.archive.org/3/items/Sugarize/ff.svg wget http://ia341002.us.archive.org/3/items/Sugarize/l.svg
To Run (once per program that you want to Sugar Coat):
- Locate an icon you want to use/reuse.
- You can copy any .svg file located in /usr/share/activities/*.activity/activity/*.svg
- Or you can use one of the icons CatMoran created--and downloaded using the wget commands listed above. plain.svg is a plain circle, ff.svg is a circle with the letters FF (for Firefox) inside, l.svg is a circle with the single letter L inside. Both of the latter files can be easily edited using any text editor and one or both character(s) changed. Each letter is in plain text just before the </tspan> tags, replace them and save the file.
- In Uruguay, the XO laptops do not allow you to login as root because LATU have blocked this.
Sugar Coat Script Mirror Servers
- Main Page - http://www.archive.org/details/Sugarize
- The HTTP - http://ia341002.us.archive.org/3/items/Sugarize
- The FTP - ftp://ia341002.us.archive.org/3/items/Sugarize
- See also: - Sugarize_an_application_for_use_in_a_SoaS_USB
- Alternate Instructions: wiki-sugarize.txt
- Local storage of needed files:http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/sugarize/ with permission from Albert Cahalan.
- Source - http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1555.0
- http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/albert/sugarize/
Comments
Look at: http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/sugarize/wiki-sugarize.txt
I haven't been able to get this to work in Update.1 --leetcharmer
Rob - I modified the script to work in Update 1 for SeaMonkey, but it requires an effective disabling of security. The crux of the problem is that Rainbow 1) runs your application as a totally new user each time (never as "olpc"), 2) these "on-the-fly" users don't have write access to their home directories, and 3) these "on-the-fly" users are destroyed on reboot. All of these users are created in the same persistent group, and all share write access to a common "data" directory for the group. (The preceding is just a paraphrase of the Rainbow docs - should likely be a link). In the case of non-Sugar apps, the application has no idea that the usual role of a user has been migrated to a group, and so the application is unlikely to create it's data files with the correct permissions. Further, since the "on-the-fly" users are destroyed on each reboot, if the username appears in persistent data (e.g., absolute pathnames), the application will fail after a reboot. All of these issues are addressed in the following for the SeaMonkey application.
Note Well: The following instructions essentially remove all security on your machine. If you have set passwords on any of the machine accounts (root, olpc, etc.), likely you don't want to execute these instructions.
[olpc@xo ~]$ su [olpc@xo ~]# chmod a+s /bin/chmod
These lines allow any user to change permissions on any file and/or directory in the system. Therefore, having something only readable / executable by root is no longer a protection, since an unprivileged user can just change the permissions. In my case, I couldn't lose what I didn't have -- I have no password for the root or olpc users, so there was no effective change.
In general sudo would be a more graceful approach to this problem, but I couldn't get it to work in a script (first, you need to allow all uids > 10000; second, you need it to not prompt for a password; and third, su can't be invoked from a Sugar script because stdin is not a tty, even if no password is required).
After using the above to allow the Rainbow "on-the-fly" users to change permissions on files they don't own, we use the chmod ability in the script. The following script is just CatMoran's script with a few lines added at the beginning. Any other minor formatting changes are accidental and a result of my editing the file 100 times to try to find out why it wasn't working. I've only tested this script with SeaMonkey -- but I think similar ideas would work for other applications.
#!/bin/sh # Causes SeaMonkey to put the .mozilla directory in a # place that is writable, and also where Rainbow wants # it. SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT/data is not directly suitable # since it contains a reference to a user that will # be destroyed on reboot, and SeaMonkey stores absolute # pathnames in its persistent data. export HOME=`/bin/ls -l $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT/data | /usr/bin/awk '{ print $10 }'` # libgnomevfs ignores the HOME environment variable, # so make our actual home directory writable for the # .gnome2 and .gnome2_private directories. chmod g+w $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT # SeaMonkey ignores umask and makes everything # only user-accessible. But, we're running as # a different user each time. So make everything # in HOME group-accessible (at a minimum, make # .mozilla and everything in it group-accessible). chmod -R g+rwx $HOME/.* chmod -R g+rwx $HOME/* while [ -n "$2" ] ; do case "$1" in -b | --bundle-id) export SUGAR_BUNDLE_ID="$2" ;; -a | --activity-id) export SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ID="$2" ;; -o | --object-id) export SUGAR_OBJECT_ID="$2" ;; -u | --uri) export SUGAR_URI="$2" ;; *) echo unknown argument $1 $2 ;; esac shift;shift done export LD_PRELOAD="$SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH/lib/libsugarize.so" export NET_WM_NAME="SeaMonkey" exec /usr/bin/seamonkey
Brian - To make this work for SoaS Release 1 (Sugar 0.84.2) the sug script needs to be updated.
CREATEPATH=/home/liveuser/Activities/