working without a Home directory

[adriangolding]

is it possible to create a user (eg, john) account without a home directory for that user (eg, /home/john) and yet he is able to perform tasks on that desktop gracefully? for example, surfing on the internet, using googledocs etc.

i created such an account but i can't even log into it smoothly.
the reason for wanting to do something like this is to disallow the user to do any writes to the filesystem at all.

how do LiveCDs work in that sense? they do not have a writable disk. How difficult would it be to do modify a linux OS in the hard drive to do something like that?

[GNU-Fan]

Hello,

LiveCDs usually employ ramdisks for this. These are filesystems created only in RAM. The home directory is then created in that filesystem.

This way, the user can write anything he wants to his temporary home directory. When she logs out or the computer is shut down, the memory is freed and everthing that has been written to it will vanish.

Linux Ramdisk mini-HOWTO

[adriangolding]

thank you! i followed the HOWTO and i think it works for my problem!