On 10/28/2002 03:59 AM, Radule Soskic wrote:
On Sun, 2002-10-27 at 14:16, Philipp Thomas wrote:
<soapbox> First of all, please be advised that you should *not* start X as user root as the risks of severely damaging your system are very high. You should login as normal user and only switch to root where needed. </soapbox>
Thank you for this advice. In fact, I already have heard about this earlier several times. Now, could you please make it more clear: is it just because root user's unlimited power (so if he makes mistake it can be a disaster) or there are other risks too? If so - what are these risks? Actually, I log in as root very often, since I am the only user on this machine, so I definitely would want to know more...TIA
Logging in as root in a console is very different to logging in to an X session as root. Besides the security aspects mentioned, IMHO X and X apps are more buggy than other aspects of Linux (but I still use them), and any buggy app with root privilege is a danger. The difference is easily seen with "ps aux". When you are in a console, run that command, and see how many processes are running (with who's rights) to support that session. Then, do the same in a xterm after X is up. IMO, it is intrinsically better to have most of those processes running with my user rights (and therefore limited powers of destruction) than root. Another aspect is the ease and power of the graphical programs. It is much easier to do SOME operations in, for example, Konquerer. I know from experience/mistake that sometimes it is too easy (or maybe more things happening than expected). I have mistakenly tried deleting symlinks to find out that instead of the link being deleted the whole directory and subdirectory was gone it was pointed to. If you run your machine as a user, and su or sux or kdesu to root only as needed, your chances of making simple but terrible mistakes is minimized. HTH ;-) -- Joe & Sesil Morris New Tribes Mission Email Address: Joe_Morris@ntm.org Web Address: http://www.mydestiny.net/~joe_morris Registered Linux user 231871 God said, I AM that I AM. I say, by the grace God, I am what I am.