Need Linux help for my OLPC

[TomCrawford]

I participated in the One Laptop Per Child "Give One Get One"  I now have mine BUT . . .  I plan to give this to my grandson.  I started it up before he arrived to see what is on it & understand it so I could show him.  The first thing it asks is your name and without a lot of thought I put in mine. Surely there would be a simple way to change this or add a user, right?  Well. . . NO there is not.  After some searching I found this brief information on it's Linux implementation.http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Understanding_sugar_code  I have never done anything in Linux but I think contents item #7
"Sugar is going to pull the user name from the profile. If there is no name, FirstTimeDialog is called to get the user's nick name. Then, the profile utility will store the name and color.
name = profile.get_nick_name()
if not name or not len(name):
dialog = FirstTimeDialog()
dialog.run
profile.update()
A quick browse through profile.py shows that the nickname is stored in '/home/olpc/.sugar/default/config'. The config file also contains a default color for the user. I bet the color could be changed by adjusting this string.
Also, there are subdirectories here for activities logs, gecko stuff, network management, and a cache. That directory is a nice find.
How is your user color picked? FirstTimeDialog calls iconcolor.py. Iconcolor.py in turn randomly picks a color from the list in color.py and that's your permanent color. This only happens if you don't have a config file, so if you delete that file, you can change your nickname and color.

says that if I delete the config file I can restart the machine and this time enter my grandsons name.  If that is correct and I get to the console with alt-0  (see contents item 2) what do I do to delete that file.  And if I delete that file what is the chance I will be in even bigger trouble?  Alternately, would it be easy, for a non-Linux person just edit that file and change the name. If so how?

 

[daveg]

My guess is that you need to use the "sugar-control-panel" command in the terminal. For example:

sugar-control-panel -h

will print the usage options for sugar-control-panel (note that is a "space" before the "-h" in the line above).

Among the settable keys, there is a "nick" key, that I assume means nickname. There is also a settable "color" key. The following command should list all available keys:

sugar-control-panel -l

The following command should list the current setting for the "nick" key:

sugar-control-panel -g nick

There is a "-s" option for setting a keys value, for example "john":

sugar-control-panel -s nick john

I don't have an OLPC, so I'm only using information that I found on the OLPC wiki pages. But, it's worth a try. I don't know if you need to prefix the commands above with "sudo", but you may.

Here's a link to the Sugar Control Panel wiki.

 

[TomCrawford]

Thanks allot!!  That worked.