Puppy Linux 4.1 - Absolutely Stunning!

Thank you Longboard & Mrk.
First, Fedora works 'out of the box' so that's what I'll play with while I
check the drivers etc..., not to worry, Windows wireless is not always seemless ; had alot of trouble with d-link cards.
(but this particular Atheros is a real problem, I've learned.)

I'll be back..

 

wrt root,

Puppy, the last time I used it, had a built-in user account named 'spot'.

Open a terminal window, type in "su spot", and type "firefox" (or whatever internet-facing application) and you are surfing in a non-root account.

Also, I added a line in the .xinitrc file (I think ... several months ago) and had a small script that opened a small terminal window during startup as user 'spot' and just typed the app name in this window.

 

You can always create a new non-root account.
See my Slackware tutorial for details how to do this.
Mrk

 

Hi Mrkvonic,

Will this work in Puppy?

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=15839
Setting up multiple users in Puppy
"Multi-user support is just about at the kernel level in *nix. User data is stored in several files in /etc, passwd, group, and shadow (which holds the passwords in encrypted form). The OS is smart enough to be able to set some variables without doing an 'export HOME={path]' like you have to do with the xdg directories or path, etc. Just try this:
Code:
echo $HOME
It will always return the path to your home directory, no matter what user you are runing as.

As for a standard method of logging in, there is and there isn't. As in most things *nix there are various small utilities, with one of the most important being /sbin/login, which in our case is replaced with a symlink to tinylogin. Most Linux systems use runlevels and are capable of booting into text mode or graphical mode, Puppy again being an exception, which makes it's boot process simpler. This is not a big deal here. The basic configuration for each runlevel is set in /etc/inittab, which usually uses a program such as getty or mingetty (there are other varients) to get an interactive console. If nothing else is specified in inittab, these programs will run by default /sbin/login, which is in charge of authenticating and logging in a user. Most distros now defrault to runlevel 5, which traditionally is set up to get a console and then immediately run a graphical login manager. These vary but the older and slimmer ones are all but unused these days in favor of kdm or gdm, parts of KDE and Gnome respectively. A few oddballs like Vector use wdm, which is based on WindowMaker libraries and is a good deal more efficient. More on this later.

In Puppy's case we have no runlevels and a very simple inittab. There are just two virtual consoles (tty1 and tty2), and since no runlevels are specified we default to using tty1. In Puppy's inittab Barry has this set up to run the program 'autologinroot', and because of the way getty is working it runs continuously so if you log root out getty will immediately run autologinroot again.

When a user logs in, in order to set the environment up the file /etc/profile is sourced. This is where variables like $PATH or $XDG_DATA_DIRS are set. Other things can be set here as well, such as the shell prompt, default shell (yes, there is more than just Bash), etc. Since this reads as a shell script, programs can also be run in it. For example, in Slackware (and a lot of traditional Unix systems) the program fortune is run on login, giving you one of several thousand fortunes stored on the machine, many of which are just small bits of comedy. Not really useful but it broke up the boredom of an empty console prompt. In Puppy, Barry has devised a method to determine if this is the first login since bootup and if so, it automatically runs xwin. So this is how we are able to go straight into the desktop when the boot process completes.

This is all of course simplified, but it gives a general idea what normally happens when a Linux machine boots, and what some of the differences are in Puppy.

Here's another link on the subject of a non-root user in Puppy:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=35523&sid=60a4a564896e811c2127fb466dcb082e
How to setup a non-root user on full install?
"Got it. It is not yourself you don't trust. Neither is it someone who has physical access to your machine. You want a successful SSH attack to be limited in scope.
1) I've been reading about specific vulnerabilities with SSH lately, so this one needs to be up to snuff, in terms of knowing specifics of the vulnerabilities.
2) Puppy doesn't lend itself to running the desktop environment, as you specified you want, merely by adding users and setting permissions. It is more technically involved than that. I'm not saying it can't be done, it just doesn't lend itself to it.
3) The most practical approach would be to use one of the distros which did work for you and allows for multiple users to run the desktop environment

 

Lots of info ... the simplest thing is to try
Ubuntu uses different runlevels as well, this does not prevent it from being useful. So just try whatever you want and see if you can get it done.
Mrk