On Wednesday 10 August 2005 19:46, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
1. When you surf the web to download the new software, you could possibly get attacked by malicious web sites. The malicious code would then be executed with root priviledges and can do anything it likes.
Well okay, I'll explain one thing. I'm not sasying that I want to login as root for stuff like browsing the web. That's stupid, yeah, like Fred Miller wrote and for the reasons you have outlined. I only want to login graphically as root for running stuff like YaST Boot Loader Config, Partitioner etc.
You do not need to login as root to use YaST. It will ask for the root password when you launch from the K menu (the green blob in SuSE) under System as a regular user.
2. Graphical applications are way more complicated and so there is a higher chance that they could contain bugs. KDE is running a whole bunch of many high complex applications which are running in foreground or in background. Every bug of these applications running as root is able to do anything to your system what it likes. A handful of bytes written in the first few sectors of your harddisk and your partition table is broken and all your data is lost.
Right. So get in, do what you need to do real quick, and get out. Is that it?
So somebody tell me how I exit from an X Windows Session to a pure text session.
In the same System menu there is also a superuser terminal entry as well. Although I would avoid the cmd line until you are competent with it as a regular user. If you're still unhappy (why?!?) use Ctrl-Alt-F1 through F6 for true text console, and Ctrl-Alt-F7 to return to the GUI.
3. With a graphical user interface it's very easy to delete unwanted files.
Precisely. I needed this too, but recognize the issues you warn me of.
Again, in the same System menu there is a superuser file manager entry as well. So you can erase files that you do not have appropriate permissions for. This is all on 9.3 BTW. Not sure what is available on previous versions. -- Steve Boddy