Re: root login
On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 09:27, Sven Luther wrote:
> 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.
That's because the GNOME in Debian is badly integrated. Launch gdmsetup,
or try to log out on a a Red Hat box, and you get asked for the root
password, and you can shutdown as a normal user (configurable).
--
Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net>
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