I agree, which is why I did it - for 4.2.1 anyway. And I documented the process to the best of my ability so that if/when Puppy decides to adopt it they won't have to figure as much out on their own.I'd be delighted if proper multi-user support got put back into Puppy.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47409
The average paranoid user doesn't really need it, but proper multiuser support would allow Puppy to spread into other niches. Even just being used as a family PC. Sure, Puppy can do the multiple save file deal, which is nice, but that doesn't stop Jr. from deleting the savefile itself, or reformatting the harddrive.
Limited accounts would at least make it more difficult. He could still try booting from a live CD, and if you disable that he could try resetting the bios, or just pulling the drive and mounting it from another machine - but he would have to be very intentionally malicious to do those things. If he's just cranky or an idiot, limited permissions will stop him.
I have to admit, I'm pretty used to root. And for good reason, because during the beginning I spent large amounts of my time screwing around with Puppy's boot scripts, installing stuff, deleting things, etc. Running as other than root would have been impractical.
I haven't been doing anywhere near as much of that lately though, other than recently as I have been working on making my own distro. But when not doing that, I've mostly been working on applications and utilities, and less of the core systems type stuff. So now it would be possible for me to be a user on a regular basis.
When I get CheesyRamHog usable enough, I intend to do that. I need to get used to not being root, because one of the career paths I may wind up following is being a sysadmin. Like DMcCunney's friend found out, bad habits can get you into trouble.
Linux basically has one firewall program. IPtables. There are many frontends that you use to configure it, but they all do the same thing.Puppy at least has a firewall that I can activate in set up while neither Elive nor Antix had such and the one in ubuntu and Mint I totally failed to understand if it was active or not.
To see what is currently configured, on any modern Linux, you just run iptables -v -L and it will output the configuration to the terminal. Understanding what it means is another thing, but you can at least see that something is set up. If nothing is configured, it will look about like this:
Code: Select all
# iptables -v -L
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 2 packets, 252 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 2 packets, 252 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
As long as the particular firewall configuration doesn't rely on some weird module that the average kernel doesn't have enabled, it can be used on nearly any modern distro (has to support iptables at least). You can use iptables-save > firewall_file to save it to "firewall_file", and then drop that into the other distro and run iptables-restore < firewall_file to restore it. Of course, you would probably need to configure the new distro to re-use that same firewall each boot. How you do that is a function of the distro, but the support people for whichever distro would probably be able to help you.