I've discovered that the Administration menu is hidden in GNOME on the XO-1.5 for the simple reason that there are no administration applications installed. It reveals itself once you install something that places an icon there.
For example, you can install Fedora's GUI installer via the command line. First, connect to the Internet, then open a terminal. I normally just press Ctrl+Alt+Neighbourhood-View to get a console. Type this command:
# yum install gnome-packagekit
Answer Yes to all the questions, and it will download and install the relevant packages. After it has finished, reboot.
If you aren't already in GNOME, switch to it. Click on the System menu at the top and you'll now see the Administration sub-menu.
In that menu, click "Add/Remove Software". You may need to be patient while it is loading and waiting for system processes. If it is doing something, it will be reported in the bottom-left corner, just above the Help button.
Once it's up and running, you can browse through the categories or use the search bar.
Sridhar Dhanapalan Technical Co-ordinator One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Australia p: +61 425 239 701 w: http://laptop.org.au
El Tue, 15-06-2010 a las 00:36 +0930, Sridhar Dhanapalan escribió:
# yum install gnome-packagekit
This opens several dilemmas:
1) olpc-update and rpm don't play well together. Normally, I'd tend to kill the home-brew solution in favor of the upstream supported one, but yum still has unsolvable issues, especially on the XO-1.
2) it's easy to break your system by installing fancy packages, or too many large packages. You could even open security holes.
3) users can use packagekit even to uninstall system packages
4) Even our stripped-down GNOME desktop offers enough dangerous knobs which some "adventurous" users exploit to break their system configuration in many non-obvious ways.
This is not speculation. we're actually receiving plenty of complaints from teachers and technicians. In response, we've taught them how to reset the desktop configuration to defaults with this crude method:
rm -rf .gconf .gnome2 .config
We cannot assume our target audience to act responsibly and rationally. Even for adults, some desktop distros provide a simplified UI listing only popular desktop applications. GNOME also offers some lock-down options from kiosk mode, which we should consider for the XO.
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Bernie Innocenti -
Sridhar Dhanapalan