Hi, forfyv.
I personally never felt a need for it, but FYI:
"pizzasgood", I believe, has put together a Puppy derivative with separate user capacity (not running as root). Maybe make a search on the forum. Might date from a year ago.
Yes, I saw the distro you mentioned, it is a 4.x version. I am using the latest release, 5.2.5. I really like this version, why should I downgrade?
Also, as was mentioned above, you could have each of your users run his/her Puppy "Internet cafe" style, from his/her own DVD. This is perfectly safe and entirely removes the need for additional code for separating users.
Alternatively, you can save the main sfs on hard-disk and each user can have his/her own personal encrypted savefile on hard-disk or usb-disk or flash-card. In this case, the user boots from cd/dvd, but the boot-up script fetches the Puppy sfs and the individual savefile on the user-provided media. Again, very safe. The system also boots much faster that if entirely based on DVD (as in paragraph above).
Those solutions stray from mainstream Linux thinking on the subject of root, but IMHO they are more practical and more user-friendly, while maintaining very high protection and safety for the user, system, and hardware.
Incidentally, Happy Easter, if this applies to the culture you're from.
Happy Easter to you as well.
(I am not christian, but appreciate the sentiment!)
Yes, the alternative solutions are valid, and (ahem), they do stray somewhat from normal UNIX paradigm.
I think the point many people are missing here is that a "normal" UNIX solution would be easy to impliment, and does NOT require a new distro.
A developer, (me I guess), could create a PET that allows a root user to manage users and groups. That is all that is needed.
If a puppy user does not want to manage users, fine, don't. However for a distro to NOT have some facility, (beyond CLI), to manage users is rather awkward for a normal UNIX guy.
Another point that the experienced developers here miss, is that for THEM to build such a PET would be almost trivial, if they just decided to do it.
For ME to do it requires another learning curve, and hours trying to get things to work, that an experienced guy would already know.
Silly, because it is just an attitude that is preventing it from being done.
Thanks for your comments!
45 Mike
www.45inx.com