[PLUG] Such a thing as a "single user" Linux?

Paul Mullen pm at nellump.net
Mon Sep 29 20:53:59 UTC 2014


On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 08:02:16AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> Its more a philosophical than strictly technical requirement.
> Debian developers are *POWER* users and presume everyone has
> terabyte storage, multi GHz multi-processors, and massive bandwidth.
> I take "small is ultimate elegance" in the other extreme. That my
> motivation for investigating debootstrap and multistrap.

Debian will run happily on a very broad spectrum of hardware.  If you
don't want all of the latest processor-crushing complexity, don't
install it.  When the installer presents you with the list of
available "tasks" to choose from, select only the base system option.
You can always add more packages later.

> I'm not quite being paranoid. I'm thinking in terms of preventing 
> someone from using  a USB Bluetooth or WiFi adapter they have 
> brought in.

Compile a custom kernel with only the drivers the system will need.
Users can plug in whatever they want, but if the kernel hasn't the
drivers for the hardware, it won't accomplish much.  Compiling a
kernel isn't a typical Linux-newbie activity, but I'm sure you can get
any help you might need here on the list.


-- 
Paul Mullen



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