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Re: destroying one's account, the easy way?



2009/1/12 Florian Mickler <florian@mickler.org>:
> Hi!
>
> Last week my mother (supplied by me with a debian-testing system,
> running kde) did call me with fear in hear voice: "the computer isn't
> working anymore! and all my files are lost! and my emails! and the
> internet has vanished!"
>
> soon i found out, that she had tried to clean up her homefolder
> (organizing her files in folders, as she has learned in some
> computer-course she has taken) and got confused and has clicked once or
> twice too much on 'proceed','overwrite', 'copy'... (i don't know
> exactly what she did, it took her a long time too... )
>
> after much discussion ("that can't be possible, as you didn't delete
> anything, the files are still there, you just can't see them,
> because they are in some subfolder!") i talked her through building an
> ssh-reverse tunnel to one of my machines and i could investigate and
> repair the problem.
>
>
> somehow she has  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 as
> she is a beginner at computers and of age, she couldn't cope
> with her computer anymore.
>
> So, my question, dear reader:
>
> Is there a way to shield her from doing smth like that again?
> What are the kde-safeguards for moving the homefolder (which is easy
> enough, if you are not so confident with mouse-handling)?
>
> What are the big Do's and Don'ts if you setup a linux desktop for
> senior beginners?
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Florian
>
> p.s. please cc me, as i'm not on this list
>

KDE 4 makes this easy. I will use the username "user" and her real
name "florence" for purpose of example.

Make a folder /home/user/Florence/Desktop. Now point Dolphin to use
/home/user/Florence and the default directory, and set the KDE Desktop
to point to /home/user/Florence/Desktop. Confugure Tbird, Firefox,
Ktorrent, and everything else to save to /home/user/Florence instead
of /home/user or /home/user/Desktop. So long as she never goes to
/home/user she will stay out of trouble.

Of course, all this could be avoided if you can convince her never to
show hidden directories, or even if you had a nightly backup script..

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
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