On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 08:53:07AM -0500, Benjamin Sher wrote: > I am only reporting what the author says. I installed K3b from apt-get. When I > tried to use it, I got this message. After being told that I should run K3b > as user, I switched to user, but as soon as I tried to run it as user, I got > the author's admonition again. So, to be on the safe side, I'm going to stick > with his recommendation. Hi Benjamin, In general, it's a very bad idea to run as root when it's not necessary. So the question to ask here is: other than the warning, does anything bad happen when you run k3b as a non-root user? Can you still burn CDs when you're not root? I installed k3b on my end (version 0.12.2, KDE version 3.4.1) and burned a CD, all as a regular user. Everything worked fine. I never got the error that you got. I suspect you have some other configuration somewhere that's making it necessary for you to run as root. Could you send us the ownership and permissions on your CD burner? It may be /dev/hdc, but it'll really depend on your system. On my end, the permissions are brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 2005-07-17 08:47 /dev/hdc Notice that the group 'cdrom' can write to the device. In turn, I am a member of group 'cdrom'. Hence I don't need to be root to write to it. It *may* be the case that you've not made yourself a member of the appropriate group, so k3b tells you that you need to be root. But I'm not sure. The bottom line is that there's no good reason to run k3b as root, and many bad reasons. So you should avoid running as root if at all possible. At the very worst you should be doing 'sudo k3b', but even that is too much. -- Stephen R. Laniel steve@laniels.org +(617) 308-5571 http://laniels.org/ PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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