Re: destroying one's account, the easy way?
Florian Mickler <firstname.lastname@example.org> wrote:
> Last week my mother (supplied by me with a debian-testing system,
> running kde) [...] succeeded in moving her complete homefolder (.*-files
> included) into subfolders of her homefolder...
> i don't know how that can happen, but apparently there are no safeguards
> in place. (Or at least they are easily clicked away)
> That resulted in landing in a complete new gnome-environment. and
> [...] she couldn't cope with her computer anymore.
Gnome? I thought you said KDE. (However, it's no matter.)
> Is there a way to shield her from doing smth like that again?
If you create a script that uses something like rsnapshot you could
copy the files to a "safe" place elswhere in the filesystem. It won't
help with a disk crash or filesystem corruption, but it could make
it easier to restore a "broken" home. Put the script in your .profile
(.bash_profile, whatever) and ensure that it only gets called once a
day. Or if the machine is treated like a PC and switched off *regularly*,
get it to run the script at startup.
If you're really cunning you could create a second user account (perhaps
called "help", or "restore") that offers a simple menu of choices -
selective restore of a file, restore of all "system" files (i.e. your
mother's dot files), restore of a folder, restore of everything ("are
you really sure!?")
> What are the big Do's and Don'ts if you setup a linux desktop for
> senior beginners?
I'm not sure that being senior is relevant. Anyone can break their own
user account on pretty much any OS if they don't know what they're doing.