Hoyt Bailey wrote:
There are a few things I dont understand about Debians login screen. 1. Root cannot log in on this screen. Why?Because it's dangerous and stupid. Just use su -m when you need root, and end that session as soon as you don't need root anymore.
[snip]
Ok for us stupid newbies. Why is it dangerous and stupid. RH and Caldera support an item in their login screen called I believe "Consol" which dumps you back to prior to startx and I recall root was included on the login screen. I would like at least the promise made after the logout button is pushed to be provided and I dont think that is unreasonable. Regards; Hoyt
Because when you login, every process runs with the permissions of the user that started it. So logging into X as root is dangerous becuase it makes it very easy to make a mistake and accidentally delete something or otherwise hose your system. As far as virsuses, if you happened to get one through email (unlikely) or fro untarring an unknown tarball, it would have root permissions and could easily wreak havoc. The idea of the root account is that it is for system maintenance, and should only be used for that. Thus, when you encounter a specific task like updating with apt, you use su or sudo and accomplish the task and then go back to being a normal user. The reason why distros like RH and Caldera support it is that much of their market (I believe) is former Windows admins or people running mixed shops. Once you are accustomed to the crutch of a GUI on a server it is difficult to change your way of thinking. In fact, you can setup GDM or KDM to allow root login, but Debian has it disabled by default. It is disabled for precisely the reasons I mentioned above. It is very risky to run so many processes as root. -Roberto -Roberto
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