Re: root login
On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 07:01:48PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <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.)
But it is disabled out of the box, and you have to edit the gdm.conf
file to enable it. And also, i usually set my box up to autolog into the
user session the first time, and i think that for a home system, there
is not really a need for the user to see gdm, altough the new debian
theme in gdm2 is very very very nice.
> > 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.
Yes.
BTW, the gdm configurator can be enabled by adding sudo to the .desktop
file, and it works without problem.
Now, i think the logout/shutdown thingy cannot be done as easily. Maybe
a hidden/gconf setting to use sudo would enable this, i don't think it
would be that difficult to do, you just need to :
o add the gconf pref.
o add the sudo call before doing the actual shutdown.
Right ?
> > 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.
I was never able to really understand how the redhat thingy was working,
i have thought since a long time that the easiest solution would be to
have a message passing system between the gnome/whatever logout dialog
and gdm/kdm/whatever which would tell gdm to not reload X, but do the
actual shutdown.
Another message passing system with lilo/grub, would enable you to have
a kind of reboot into <a list of alternatives boots>. Doing this with
grub would be easier than with lilo, since you simply need to modify the
configuration file, and not touch the mbr or wherever lilo is directly.
It would be non-portable and i386 only, but i guess that if we have a
correct protocol for this, other arches boot-loaders can also adapt to
it.
> 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.
Yep.
If i get time, i will most assuredly try this out or push for it or
whatever.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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