William Stein wrote: > On Jan 30, 2008 2:19 PM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Joel B. Mohler wrote: >>> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 10:13:09AM -0600, Jason Grout wrote: >>>> Now, for the ncurses part. It seems like it would be very, very nice to >>>> have a minimal admin menu using ncurses or newt (with the python snack >>>> module) or dialog. Each of these has a python module, so hopefully it >>>> should be fairly easy. I've never done any text-based GUI programming, >>>> but I'm willing to try to whip up something. Are there any experts here >>>> that could give some advice about what to use or how to do it (or whip >>>> something up even faster)? It seems that an interface that at least has >>>> the options to create a remote ssh account, set up sage to start on >>>> bootup, and set the networking information for the box (DHCP or a static >>>> address) would answer some of the issues above. In the future, we could >>>> add to the menu and keep things simple for non-unix people. >>> Wouldn't it be much easier to program and use if the vmware image would >>> start a >>> web server (presumably something from twisted) and provide control panel >>> from >>> the default IP address? All of these configuration things (which don't >>> involve >>> vmware player) are quite doable from a web interface. This is would fit in >>> to >>> the sage web interface idea and also be quite similar to the things that >>> anyone >>> needs to know to set up any old router that they buy for their home network. >>> >>> All you have to do then is start the image in vmware player, wait a suitable >>> period of time, load up your web-browser and go to http://192.168.x.x. >> That's a good point; it would be more familiar and possibly easier to >> use. Are there security issues with this? Having a default >> publicly-accessible configuration panel seems like an exploit waiting to >> happen (even if we have a default username/password). That's why I >> preferred the image being locked down until someone sitting at the >> console opened it up to outside access. > > We should install a _minimal_ X server and window manager, > and completely replace the current text view on bootup with a similar > GUI that comes from the X server (but hopefully looks like a native > windows app as much as possible). This way the users mouse won't > get trapped. Also, maybe cut and paste will work. (This is actually > how the sage-vmware image used to be 2 years ago.) A minimal > X server takes very little disk space, e.g., Damn Small Linux has > one and it takes < 60MB or so for all of Linux. > > People should not have to worry about username / passwords > on windows by default. This isn't a problem at all if the vmware > image is using shared networking, which is the *default*, since then > only the local computer can connect to the vmware image. The > only time the sort of security issues that sparked this discussion come > up are when one explicitly changes the notebook to use bridged > networking.
Good point about familiarity and good point about usernames and passwords. Maybe we really ought to have two (slightly different) versions of the vmware image: a single-user version and a server version. I'm investigating getting the size down. I installed Ubuntu JeOS on an image last night and things are looking fairly tiny (but probably not nearly as tiny as DSL). Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
