[idea]Dummy Terminal Box

[Lucifiel]

I'd love to see a Dummy Terminal Box(sandbox) included. This would allow people to mess around with various settings, without destroying their own computers.

I've seen something similar to a Dummy Terminal Box, being used by www.w3schools.com You can practise html and other scripts by using a Dummy box that shows you the changes but as soon as you leave the page, everything resets.

For Ubuntu, basically, you get to put in a certain amount of commands and then, when you shut down the Dummy Terminal, nothing is retained and no changes are made. Perhaps, only the very basic functions(or should that be called extension?) of a command like sudo <command> and some other similar commands like man <command> would be supported, so users can practise without the fear of unleashing Godzilla on their computer.

And perhaps to prevent damage, commands like gksudo nautilus should not be supported.


Edit:

Also, for a Dummy Terminal Box, perhaps only certain settings and keyboard shortcuts can work within the Box. This is to prevent said user from launching some key combination and finding himself stuck and panicking and cold rebooting when for an advanced/intermediate user, simply hitting certain keys would do away with that issue.

Examples:

Larry is new to Ubuntu. He has just installed Ubuntu about 1 to 2 weeks ago. Having read a couple of tutorials and guides, he has gained a certain idea of how to install programs via Synaptic and how to burn CDs and so on. However, he is still unclear and rather confused about basic commands like "sudo", "man <command>", etc. He is also afraid of using the wrong commands and thus, causing certain programs to not work.

[simplyw00x]

People aren't, as a rule, interested in learning how to use their computers, and Ubuntu is basically bui;lt on this philosophy. If people were willing to spend time doing something out of intellectual curiousity simplyto become better-informed about their computer, Ubuntu's rasion d'être would disappear.

[willskills]

rasion d'être

In context +5 w00x! :D

I agree though, it's a nice idea - would be helpful to a point, but making mistakes is so much a part of your learning process, I don't see the benefits of this much :)

[Lucifiel]

Oh actually, I thought the Dummy Terminal box would be useful especially for learning how to apply certain specific commands and what effect they have on the o/s. It's true that everyone makes mistakes from time to time but the severity of an issue could cause certain problems for others.

[Jonne]

The 'terminal box' you want is called vmware (player/server/whatever version you like, or virtualbox, or xen, or any of the other virtualisation apps).

[rich.bradshaw]

I just type ls intead of rm for instance, to see what files will be affected.

i.e. if I wanted to rm -r *, I'd type ls -r * and see what files were picked up.