The Future of Fedora.

[Nathan Fredrickson]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 05:31, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:51:31AM +0200, Alexey Eremenko wrote:
> >       I want to work ALWAYS as a root. (like a do in Windows XP as            
> >    Administrator by default)                                                  
> 
> No way, no how.
> 
> Set up gpm and and pam to autologin as a user who has the ability to run
> certain tasks as root (yum, rpm and xcdroast being the only ones I would
> need but YMMV).

Apple handles the root issue an interesting way in OSX.  The root
account does not even allow logins by default unless you go to the
command line and set a password for it.  "Admin users" of the system
instead get added to an admin group that has sudo privileges.  By using
sudo instead of su means that the popup password dialogs expect the
user's own password instead of the root password.

The overall effect of this setup is that the average user does not even
know that a root account exists and is simply asked for their password
when carrying out important tasks.  This sort of scheme is familiar to
many users since it is similar to the way some websites like Ebay or
Yahoo re-prompt for your password for important operations.

Nathan