Hi Steve-- On 12/11/2010 10:00 AM, steve beltzer wrote: > My netbook is still running slow from my home via Debian / Iceweasel and at > reasonable speed via Windows 7 / Firefox: I recently opened Iceweasel from > a terminal as root and got this message in a dialogue box: These messages are because your superuser shell (you probably entered into it with something like "su -" ?) doesn't have direct access to your X11 session or to the running dbus session. This is expected, and probably a good thing so that you don't run things like web browsers as the superuser. ;) The reason for privilege separation like this is to make sure that if one program runs amok (e.g. a web browser, which is a huge amount of complex code reading, parsing, and acting on a lot of code coming in over an untrustworthy network) it won't be able to do things like hose your entire computer. I know some people who always run their web browsing in a dedicated user account, in fact, not even their primary user account, so that a buggy or compromised browser can't trash their important data. > It doesn't return the prompt.... the way a shell works is that it launches commands, and then returns a prompt when the command is done. If iceweasel is still running, then you won't get a prompt back until iceweasel itself terminates. make sense? The only situation where that isn't true is (for example) if the iceweasel discovers another process it thinks can handle the request (e.g. another instance of iceweasel) and it talks to that process and sends it a request to open a window on its behalf. then the requesting process has done it's duty, and it can terminate, which brings you back to the shell. Make sense? --dkg PS An interesting question to think about: what kinds of things would happen if the shell never waited for its child processes to terminate before returning a new prompt?
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