(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello everyone. I am running xenialpup64 7.5 Linux 4.9.58. I have been using other distros such as Fedora, Linux Mint, Manjaro, etc. On each of these i have installed my favorite IRC chat client, irssi and have never had any issues running the program. I was able to successfully install irssi on my puppy but when I try to connect to irc.geekshed.net I get the following message:

15:29 !Defiant.GeekShed.net *** No ident response; username prefixed with ~
15:29 !Defiant.GeekShed.net *** Found your hostname
15:29 -!- root Erroneous Nickname: Reserved for services

This doesn't happen when I connect to Freenode, for example. It seems that since puppy automatically logs you in as root user that the server for geekshed balks at the ~root ident. Would you guys think that I am correct in assuming that I need to add a lower-lever user account to my puppy? If so, I have looked around the forum and found some decent guides on doing so. However, I have one concern: the guides I found seem to be peculiar to particular puppy variants. So I'm leery of using them b/c I'm afraid I'll break my system.

Could anyone point me to a useful thread that would cover a safer way to add the user?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Perhaps you can just tell irrsi not to blab the fact that it's running as root?

bythos wrote: Could anyone point me to a useful thread that would cover a safer way to add the user?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Here's the thread that you are looking for:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=116082

If you want the application to stop complaining you can use the "run-as-spot " command, which is discussed in the above link.

There is already a lower level user called "spot" that is made for exactly this purpose (to run internet facing programs with a lower security user).

See http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/login.html for the security philosophy.

I don't have it in front of me, but there is a premade script "run-as-spot" that should run your chat application as spot. try from terminal "run-as-spot" then the normal chat client command and see if that does it.

Hello bythos,

There's absolutely no risk of "breaking your system" if you back up your save file (or folder) to a secure location before performing any experimental changes on it, or installing a new program about which you may have doubts.

Only takes a few seconds and there'll almost certainly come a time when you'll be very glad you did!

I really appreciate the replies everyone - "run-as-spot" was made to order for what I was wanting to do. It worked flawlessly.

Many thanks!