Re: Tell me what you think about "sandbox" solutions
Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 3:20 am
For the plain home user who may be browsing the forum, a session with one of the live Linux distro cds is a good sandbox - and it doesn't take up resources in your main system, or need geek credentials to set up.
Nothing is written to the machine's resident system, so rebooting after removing the live cd leaves no trace of the cd session.
At home here, rather than fuss around with creating and maintaining limited user accounts for them, I give the very young children who visit a session in The Puppy http://www.puppylinux.org/home/overview with a tied-down Seamonkey to play with. Their sessions reside entirely in ram and can be run on that old machine out the back with the sticky hdd that won't matter if it gets food down the fan vent - residual current detectors in place of course.
The older visitors have a choice of live cds from distros such as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.
These are much easier solutions for a busy auntie than creating and policing limited user accounts on the main systems, and it does give the older kids freedom to download as they want. Which they will always try to do against any restrictions, so I can avoid the cleanups this way.
Nothing is written to the machine's resident system, so rebooting after removing the live cd leaves no trace of the cd session.
At home here, rather than fuss around with creating and maintaining limited user accounts for them, I give the very young children who visit a session in The Puppy http://www.puppylinux.org/home/overview with a tied-down Seamonkey to play with. Their sessions reside entirely in ram and can be run on that old machine out the back with the sticky hdd that won't matter if it gets food down the fan vent - residual current detectors in place of course.
The older visitors have a choice of live cds from distros such as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.
These are much easier solutions for a busy auntie than creating and policing limited user accounts on the main systems, and it does give the older kids freedom to download as they want. Which they will always try to do against any restrictions, so I can avoid the cleanups this way.