I mention here, viewtopic.php?f=85&t=251 that an older version of portable-opera ran-as-spot, honoring Spot's limitations. It's 'wrapper' is substantially different than that of the current version. My attempt transpose that wrapper to the latest opera did not result in a functional web-browser. But then, as I've posted many time, a full understanding of bash is 'above my pay-grade'. The only 64-bit version I had was annoyingly version 64
. With the old forum down, searching for the post from which it originated proved impossible. I have not be able to find a link to it and don't know who built it. If anyone wants it, I can make it available.The good news:
Obtaining a functional Iron run-as-spot proved easy.
But, I don't know why. See above about my limited knowledge of Bash. The thing about Iron is that its publishers start with Chromium, strip out things they consider unnecessary and then --unlike Opera, Vivaldi and others-- DON'T put a lot of stuff back in. I had guessed that might mean that it had fewer components to interfere with my objective: run-as-spot.
Step I: Obtain the latest Linux deb version from here: https://www.srware.net/iron/#downloads
Step 2: (Potentially necessary) My /home/spot was created when Google-Chrome was SFS-loaded. If you don't have that condition install the attached PermissionChanger-3.3.pet. Mike Walsh created this pet. What it will do is create /home/spot, the Upload and Download folders within that; and a mechanism with a launcher on the Task-bar to change permissions, and to move files out of /home/spot/Downloads to /root/Downloads. There's a link to the PermissionChanger-3.3.pet on my above cited post.
Step 3: Menu>Utilities>UExtract the Iron.deb. In the extracted folder will be a /usr/share/iron folder. This is actually all you need. Copy/Move it to the location of your choice. But don't discard the rest yet.
Step 4. In the Iron folder is a script named "chrome-wrapper". Open it in your text-editor (e.g. geany). It's last line (line 163) reads:
exec $CMD_PREFIX "$HERE/chrome" "$@"
Edit that to read:
exec $CMD_PREFIX run-as-spot "$HERE/chrome" --no-sandbox"$@"
That it. Left-Clicking chrome-wrapper will start Iron and (at least on my system) identify /home/spot/Downloads as the download folder and will not allow downloading outside that spot folder.
You will have the annoying "You are using an unsupported command-line flag: --no-sandbox. Stability and security will suffer." I haven't noticed any lack of stability in any Iron run with 'no-sandbox'. And running with a sandbox serves the same purpose as 'run-as-spot': Isolate the application from the rest of your system.
The reason for not discarding the rest of the extracted package is that you'll find with both an icon and a desktop file you can use in the creation of a menu entry. See Steps 7 thru 9 of the above referred to post. You'll have to edit the desktop's Exec= line to provide the correct path to 'chrome-wrapper'.
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* I've previously run several versions of Iron under it. I don't know where this Iron stores its profile or cache. Files under /root may have been created by previous versions. But, more importantly, this version may have read a pre-existing profile as to where to place downloads. Good news. In a Puppy which had never had Iron, it ran as spot.
Just News: There's a 32-bit version. I'll see if one of my 32-bit Puppies which may never have run an Iron works as easily; and reveals if a profile needs to be created; and where it and cache are stored. Edit: Well, it ran. But spot's limitations weren't honored. No idea why.
More Just News -- kinda bad.
Iron setup as above honors spots limitation regarding downloads. Attempted downloads except into /home/spot/ fail. /home/spot exists in RAM and is cleared on shutdown. Any malware you inadvertently downloaded would be destroyed so long as you didn't move it out. But I was able to add bookmarks from a location not in /root/spot. If I can access folders other than Spot, so could a hacker.
But especially for letting us know that 32-bit Chromium Clones won't let themselves be wrangled/mangled into running as spot. I'm pretty sure that otherwise I would have awoken in the middle of some night wondering if it wasn't just Iron; gotten out of bed and spent hours exploring all of them.