Root with GUI

[Tim]

Richard Shaw:
>> The system-config* tools will prompt for
>> root authentication if necessary

Tom Horsley:
> Thousands and thousands of times in a row, in fact :-).

Not here.  Once you've authenticated, that info is cached for a few
minutes, and automatically renewed as you keep on doing things as root.
And, if you are going to be idle for a while, you can manually extend
the period without having to type in the password again (there's an icon
in the task bar where you can renew/release it).

> I'm still waiting for someone to point me to the web page
> documenting the actual case histories of horrible
> things that happened because a GUI app was running
> as root. (NOT the cases where people did stupid things
> in GUIs, I want the one that describes people doing
> perfectly normal safe operations who had horrible
> things go wrong simply because they were running
> a gui as root).

Yeah, well, the *usual* thing that cause problems is - the user stays
logged in as root, does all their work as root, all *their* files are
owned by root, so they have to keep on logging in as root to use their
files.  They paint themselves into a corner, then use that to justify
why they "need" to be root.

If you want further ideas about what goes wrong, go back through the
list and look at some of Gene's posts.  He runs as root, and comes a
cropper over it, often enough.

Traditionally IRC (as root) users have their problems, it's just making
it easy for them to become a zombie.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.