Thank you for thought and I am grateful for the consideration.

However, I am goingtot have three months of almost no work (but still get pay!) so I _can_ sort out these problems! Also, Slackware 14 DOES come with all the multi-media stuff installed, to my surprise. But it also comes with all the compilers and tools as well and I can install software for Slackware OFFLINE. This is very important for me. I want to take a look at Java when I have slackware running cleanly. Yeah, another challenge...

And, finally, I gotta know *nix. I don't need to know everything but I need to know real *nix and not a GUI. Indeed, I am absolutely NOT a GUI for everything kind of guy. In fact, I am quite retro! I still miss my old 32K Commodore PET. After typing in POKE 59468,14 I can handle a CLI. Hell, I've used CP/M with pip a:=a:*.*

Besides, slackware 14 is a huge leap forward from 13 for newbies like me and it's not going badly. I have done more, faster than I expected.

I am getting through the slackbook now and it's not bad.

So thanks for the thought but slackware is serving my needs already. I just gotta learn more to be able to get myself out of trouble

- and prevent myself getting into trouble!

By using chmod to circumvent file permissions you may have compromised the security of your system. It was explained to you in the other thread that you needed to ensure your users are in the correct groups.

If the 'master' user and the demo user are both members of the 'users' group then setting group read permissions for certain files/folders isn't much of a security issue (assuming only those two users exist [root aside]). You could also create a shared folder (/home/ftp exists by default, I think, and you could make some users-readable folders/files in there to share between users). If you just set rw(x) permissions for owner, group and others (ie 777/666 perms) then obviously that is a security issue but using permissions intelligently is not inherently a security risk.

I thought more about your students when making that statement. If one of them will give Linux a try after you demoed it it would be better to give them a flashy distro with GUI support for everything, otherwise they may be disappointed by the necesssity to use the command line.