Getting Ready for Scratch Day

Saturday is Scratch Day at GCTAA, so I'm getting the Ubuntu lab ready for our guests.  This means:

1. install Scratch
2. create a shortcut on the guest account to launch Scratch
3. configure firefox to start at the Scratch website on the guest account
4. lock the guest account using ofris, a cool deep-freeze like app for linux

To tackle each one of these tasks in turn, here's what I did:

Installing Scratch

We have 64 bit Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty") systems, so before the Scratch debian package can be installed, we needed to make sure the 32 bit libraries were present.

• sudo aptitude install ia32-libs

 After that, just download the ubuntu Scratch package from here, and force install it using

• sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i ./scratch_1.4.0.1-0ubuntu5_i386.deb

Creating a shortcut on the Unity desktop involved clicking the search icon (+ with magnifying glass), typing Sc, grabbing the Scratch icon and dragging it to the launch panel.

Installing ofris

Start by adding the Personal Package Archive (PPA) to your apt repository list and updating the package database:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tldm217/tahutek.net

Packages for Natty aren't available yet, but the packages from Maverick (10.10) work fine, so I edited the apt sources list file

• sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tldm217-tahutek_net-natty.list

changing natty to maverick with

• :g/natty/s//maverick/g
• :wq

Then I updated the package list and installed ofris-en

• sudo aptitude update
• sudo aptitude install ofris-en

After logging into the guest account (with user name student on the machines in our lab) the way I wanted it, I ran ofris to lock the account

• sudo ofris-en

which brought up a dialog box that looks like this

===================================================
    Dafturn Ofris Erdana - Locking your Systems
         By : Muhammad Faruq Nuruddinsyah
===================================================


Your choice :
  1. Freeze the system for this User only
  2. Freeze the system for specified User
  3. Freeze the system for all Users
  4. Unfreeze the system
  5. View status
  6. Exit


Please insert your choice number :

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I selected 2 to freeze the system for the guest user, typed in student, and hit enter.  After a reboot, the guest account was "frozen" and we were ready for our Scratch Day visitors.