Carefully Working with Six-Sigma People
I have worked with some very unusual people. I've worked with some very smart people as well. Sometimes they are the same people, and when that happens you need to deal with them very carefully. Why? Because they are smart enough to be curious, and smart enough to be dangerous, and not careful enough to stay out of trouble. Many people don't realize this until it's too late - they give a little too much information to someone like this and then they are constantly cleaning up the carnage that the smart, unusual person creates.
This happened today, and the key to controlling the situation is early detection. Make sure you see that this is a potentially dangerous situation as soon as possible and take steps to mitigate the damage. For instance, if the new linux user asks for root on their box, the answer doesn't have to be "No", it's better to say "What can I do for you?" Make it seem that you're more interested in doing this for them than having them waste their precious time on such mundane things.
The effect is the same. You don't need to let this person have complete control of a machine and then have to rebuild it because they decided to remove a few "offensive" libraries and the machine becomes unusable. You can help them, do the things for them that are liable to cause problems, and then all they need to do from there is to use the programs - editors, compilers, etc. that you have placed there. Simple. Disasters averted.
If you fail to do this, then it's either a constant game of catch-up and clean-up, or you have to be firm and say "We're taking this away because it's not safe at this time for you to do these things." This, unfortunately, never goes over very well. There are hurt feelings and problems, and then there's the turf wars... it's ugly and it takes months to recover.
Best to be proactive and simply avert the problem. If you find that someone who doesn't recognize the danger inadvertently "spills the beans" you need to step in quickly and offer to "help" this person - kindly explaining the problems with, say, RedHat package management. Then there's the inevitable "scary talk" about what could go wrong, and lots of offers to do things for them.
I've found this plan to be quite effective in the vast majority of cases. Today was no exception.