Restrict software for users

[kleinempfaenger]

Thanks for your answer. As I pointed out in a former reply, this would be a mayor work, as I would have to move lots of already installed programs on several accounts. I think this would lead to errors.
The system has been growing and running fine for years, but now I want to add a user account, which is limited to only a few programs.

[SeijiSensei]

Then, as I say, you should have that account own those programs and run them from $HOME/bin.

[1clue]

You're looking for a sort of self-restriction so you focus on work?

That could be kinda tough for a standard installation, especially if you mean command-line apps too.

Facebook and twitter or whatever, you could probably more easily set up a time of day and maybe a host on your router, prevent those things during business hours. The problem is, a lot of what you'd think of as social or games, it's all a web browser so you can't really handle that with permissions.

You can look up 'linux groups explained' on Google and get a much better explanation than I can give you. You could ensure that your work user is not a member of the 'games' group, and then make sure any binary game app has that group set.

Here's the short explanation:

If you open a terminal and type 'ls -al' you'll get something like -rwxr-xr-x on some files, at the left. Those rwx bits are permissions. Read is r, write is w, and execute is x. There are 3 basic entities: The owner of the file, the group of the file, and 'others', which is everyone who has access to the system.

For the restricted apps, probably the owner is root, which is fine, and the group is either games or something specific to the app, which is fine, or it's something like 'users', which is not fine.

You would want to sudo chgrp games /path/to/game for the game binary. Then make sure your work user does not belong to games, or whatever other group you set. Then you sudo chmod 750 /path/to/game to make sure your work user has no access.

I want to reiterate the warning: If you get carried away with this and start changing permissions on a lot of things, you can seriously mess up your box. I did it several times before I learned my lesson, and generally wound up reinstalling the whole system because of it. A lot of thought went into standard permissions for apps on Linux, so you'd better understand what's going on before you dive in too deep. If you're just changing permissions on games and such, that's not a big deal.

[kleinempfaenger]

Thanks again, I have read today a lot about this item. I think this is the way to get it done. It will be a lot of work, though.
I have to point out it's not abut ME. I have given up already trying to force myself to work with filters and other things for self-restriction. It doesn't work, I would have to forget my own passwords.