Paul E Condon wrote:
On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 06:44:34PM -0500, Albert wrote:
<snip>
If you run all programs as root then you are risking your system to the quality of all the code that you play with. Seriously, _don't_ _do_ _it_. As an alternative that is somewhat more safe and still pretty convenient, I take the time to log in a console as root and leave it open while I domost of my work as a user under gnome and kde. The screen looks very different under a console so it is hard to forget that I am running asroot.
Thank you, Paul. I really do appreciate your advice. It is indeed *very good* advice for most users. I certainly would not encourage anyone I personally know to do otherwise. But I started programming for a living in the late '60s doing assembler on IBM mainframes. My first desktop was a Heathkit I built myself. I keep at least three Linux systems installed on my machine. Each mounts the others as data partitions for easy fixing. For a couple of years now I have built LFS systems, installing pre-built distros from the net only when a new box came with MSCrap pre-installed. I don't mind fixing my messes and I am very careful, so it happens very seldom. When building and exploring a new distro, like Debian, running as root speeds up the process greatly.
For the record, I did screw up an installation really good a couple of years ago. I was writing a package manager app built around owner:group, supergroups and permissions. That required a wipe and rebuild.
In short, an installation, to me, is a consumable that I expect to break. It's how I learn :)
Thanks again for your concern and advice. -- Blessed are the cracked: For it is they who let in the light.