user root... is dangerous?

[tux_italian]

i have installed puppy on my hard disk,
i have successfully modify the file /etc/inittab to disable autologin,to make secure the access at the pc in the house by password.
but...is not dangerous use the pc by user root?

[Auda]

This is a bone of contention that has been going on for some time. In my opinion yes it is if you boot it from a hard drive, no it isnt if you boot from the cd. In a household with children I would like to keep the opsys away from the kids and only let them us the app.s With a HD puppy you cant do that, so its risky at best. Search the forums for some more comments.

Auda

[billstclair]

My nine-year-old daughter has been using a Puppy 2.01 PC for a few months now without incident. She only uses Firefox, and probably has never brought up a terminal window. I suppose she might one day do that and type "rm -r /" (which deletes every file on the machine) or something else horrible, but I doubt it.

It would be awfully nice for each of us to have our own login with our own settings. But the machine is still quite useful.

[raffy]

There has been discussion of using custom pup_save.3fs files (different names), and if an encrypted password can be added to it, that will be nice. (I can't find the thread now, though.)

However, the easiest thing to do is maybe to use the liveCD and modify the liveCD boot cfg file to make Puppy run entirely in RAM.

And possibly even disable the save at shutdown?

[sunburnt]

The security problem refered to is for a FULL HD install.
I & many others only use the "frugal install" which is the 3 files on the CD copied to the HD.
This, like using the CD only has the "save" file that can be corrupted, so make a backup copy!
It has the same problem as any HD that the 3 files can be erased or corrupted by power surge.
But you can just copy the files new from the CD again & copy the backup save file & all's fixed!
The HD can also have it's partition, format, & file allocation data scrambled, which a CD can't.

[GuestToo]

type "rm -r /" (which deletes every file on the machine)

i did exactly that by accident, when i was writing the uninstaller for my first Rox 2.4 package ... it quickly and efficiently erased my pup001 file and about 1 gig and a half of files from my win XP partition, before i could hit the reset button

the thing is ... if i had write access to the XP partition, it would have deleted the files whether i was running as root or as an unprivileged user

[Flash]

*Sigh.* I've been using Puppy on a multisession DVD for some time now. It sure seems to me to be the solution to the multiuser problem, for all but the most demanding users, and the answer to the question of running as root.

My advice is rip out the hard drive and put in a DVD burner, add some RAM if necessary, and give every user his or her very own multisession Puppy DVD.