Posted: Wed 31 Mar 2010, 01:03
No worries.musher0 wrote:Sorry if I got your goat, such was not my intention. I was just trying to point our a common shortcoming and / or attitude that prevents Linux from being more widely used.
First time I heard of your info. Not that I doubt your word, but please provide references outside Puppy that detail this. I suppose you could not explain more here in this thread / context.
> Nobody forces you to be a limited user.
Well, if the info is NOT readily available, even if it exists, the result is the same: I am forced to log in as a "limited" user.
I still don't know what you're talking about though.
When you install a distro, you are root. You have to actually create a limited user to use. One of the steps in the installation is usually to set a root password, unless it comes preset (in which case it should be easily found on the website for the distro).
From what I understand things are a bit different in Ubuntu-land. I've never used it. But all the other distros I've used beside Puppy (ZipSlack, Vector, RedHat, Gentoo, Arch) all start you off as root.
Disregarding Ubuntu, there is no special information needed. You just put "root" as the login name, and type the root password as the password. That's it.
I don't know what specifically you want non-Puppy references to. Here is one from a Red Hat installation guide, about the setting the root user step.
http://linux.about.com/library/bl/dist/ ... st3.25.htm
Yes yes yes, I know all that. In fact, I said as much in this thread already. I'm not talking about security against people who know what they're doing. The opposite. I'm talking about security from the people who don't know what they are doing. They aren't malevolent, they just accidentally typed /* when they meant *. Or maybe they were trying to create a filesystem image with dd and got their parameters wrong. Or maybe they thought it would be a good idea to try upgrading glibc because some program they were trying to use was complaining.RetroTechGuy wrote:If this is truly the concern, then you need to deny those users physical access to the machine.
Yeah, you can restore from backup. But why should you have to in the first place? Does that person need to have the ability to screw up the computer, thereby wasting your time and potentially losing some of your most recent data?
Ideally everybody has their own machine. Then they can be root all they want without bothering anybody else if they break it. But if you have to share a computer, it's better to not have to worry as much about needing to fix it whenever they screw it up.
Look, nobody needs to argue the benefits of being root to me. I know them. I've been using Puppy as my main OS since version 0.9.8, and have made those same arguments plenty of times to the people who occasionally show up and start trying to raise a huff about how absurd it is to be root. And I still believe them! It is correct for Puppy to be root by default.
I'm not asking for that to change.
All I'm advocating is the option to not be root, for those occasional situations where it is needed. It would still boot as root by default. There would just be a menu entry or an option in a configuration wizard that lets you toggle the autologinroot thing, so that if you want to have a login prompt you can have one. And there would be a menu entry for adding new users. None of this would be forced on anybody. People who don't care would just keep doing things the way they are.
