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I'm setting up a computer with Ubuntu 16.04 and I have two users. One called admin with administrator rights, and the other called kids without administrator rights.

I want to have the admin user be able to access everything but the kids user not have access to certain programs (such as the browser).

I found reference to a parental controls app that had this ability called Gnome Nanny, but it seems to be discontinued and I've not found it in the software center.

So my question is: How can I restrict access to certain programs for the kids user?

Abraham Murciano Benzadon
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1 Answers1

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The easiest way I can think of is to remove their ability to run the program. For example, if you are using google chrome open a terminal window using Ctrl+Alt+T and use:

$ which google-chrome
/usr/bin/google-chrome
$ ll /usr/bin/google-chrome
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar  5  2016 /usr/bin/google-chrome -> /etc/alternatives/google-chrome*
$ sudo chmod 700 /usr/bin/google-chrome

At first this appears not to work when we do another ll but that is because /usr/bin/google-chrome is a link, to a link, to a link, to a link. We need to follow the links to see it really did work:

$ ll /usr/bin/google-chrome
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar  5  2016 /usr/bin/google-chrome -> /etc/alternatives/google-chrome*
$ ll /etc/alternatives/google-chrome
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Mar  5  2016 /etc/alternatives/google-chrome -> /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable*
$ ll /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Aug  1 20:23 /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable -> /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome*
$ ll /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
-rwx------ 1 root root 2112 Aug  1 20:23 /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome*

Did I say this was the easiest way?... hmmm.

To reverse the changes (short-cutting the link following above) use:

$ sudo chmod 777 /usr/bin/google-chrome
$ ll /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2112 Aug  1 20:23 /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome*

If you have questions on a specific program post them in comments below and I'll try to figure them out for you.

WinEunuuchs2Unix
  • 102,282