Re: root login

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 02:40:22AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Jenner Alm?nzar">
> 
> > I finally got gnome working, but I have on question, why root can't login
> > on gnome 1.4?
> 
> It actually can't, or are you getting the "you shouldn't log in as root"
> message? If it's the message - read it carefully. You should not be logging
> into your X session as root. Log in as your normal user, and use su or sudo
> to do administrative tasks.

Well, there are legitimate things to do as root, that you can't do as
users. One of these things would be to run the GDM configurator, which
is in the Application menu even when you are not root, but only pop's up
a message saying that you should be root. But now you are saying that
you should not be root in gnome, and as a result, the GDM configurator
is an unusable menu entry, and should be removed.

A better solution would be to have the ability to run certain using
sudo, if you are in the sudoer database.

Maybe simply changing :

 Exec=gdmsetup

by 

 Exec="sudo gdmsetup"

in /usr/share/applications/gdmsetup.desktop, or something such should do
the trick, i don't know, maybe there is something more needed.

The other thing that root has and a simple user has not, is the ability
to shutdown or reboot the box. A similar trick could be done for this.

In gnome 1, i used to have a "sudo gshutdown" launcher, which did just
that, but this is no more possible in gnome 2. And apparently nobody
cares about this.

Now, how could this be practically solved ? Maybe we should have a group
which is configured so that it has the right to these applications, and
thus we would not really need sudo, and a setting program to be able to
add a user to this group, or we need a setting program to manage the
sudoer database, and use it in the few cases that need root.

Friendly,

Sven Luther