Re: root login
<quote who="Sven Luther">
> > 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.
(You can actually use this from GDM itself, if you allow it, but that's not
quite your point.)
> A better solution would be to have the ability to run certain using
> sudo, if you are in the sudoer database.
Or, if you can't sudo, failover to a "please type in the administrator
password" window, ie. su.
> 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.
The only reason why this functionality is not in GNOME already, is
portability. Someone needs to grab the Red Hat tool, make it handle
different operating systems, backends (and different configurations of those
backends), propose its inclusion into the GNOME Desktop release, and push
for its inclusion in other distributions.
Debian, of course, is a great place to begin that work, being a community
based operating system - we can make the decisions and changes necessary.
:-)
- Jeff
--
linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
"Socks for the foot menu!" - Liam Quin
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