Mandrake on Walmart PCs

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

You can easily get around that problem in a Unix system. Set up the boot 
loader (eg. LILO or GRUB) to set up a standard menu, something like:
1. Normal boot.
2. Command line normal boot. 
3. Maintenance mode (eg. for us Unix people single user mode).
and a few more.
4. Command line maintenance boot. 
This would look similar to the Windows boot menu.  

The Maintenance mode menu might have:
1. Set administrator password
2. Change password for a user. 
3. Add new user. 
4. Delete a user. 
5. Scan disk for errors. 
And maybe a few more things. 

For novice users, this would suffice. You could also add a settings menu 
that looks very much like the Windows settings. Those settings that require 
superuser priviledge would prompt. On SuSE, you have similar menus. When 
you run YaST2 as a regular user from KDE, it prompts for the password. 
It is very simple. Since this is a preinstall, the user does not need to 
know the underlying fole structures, etc. On first boot, the system comes 
up 
On 20 Jun 2002 at 8:17, Warren E. Agin wrote:

> Another problem is that they tend to either not implement a password, or forget it.Imagine the poor home user who sets up a profile and then forgets his admin password.

--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9