Am Montag, 7. Juli 2003 08:53 schrieb Martin Brüggebors:

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In any case you should NOT run all these progs while being logged into KDE as root, not at all.

:-) Your're right, 'root' ist not an everyday's account.

Sometimes I need root for administration purposes like online-updates, an in these cases it is even more necessary to see whether my isdn-card is online or not.

My question was more about understanding how kicker works.

Martin

Hi Martin! KDE works that way that it makes your life very hard if you really log into KDE with your root account. This is wanted, because this is unbelievable dangerous, so KDE is bugging you everywhere it can to remind you. When you run KDE as root, one click on the wrong button can wreck your whole system. KDE is a suite of thousand little applications. All those little apps like kinternet, kicker, kdesktop etc.pp. were never supposed to be run as root. If they contain a little bug that doesn't do anything as user, it can screw up your whole system if it run's as root. Another reason is: If you browse or fetch emails with your root user, then any hazardous html / javascript / java / (put any client side dynamic content solution here) code that triggers a yet unknown security hole will have root access to your system. If browsing as user, all bad code would only have user privileges and cannot harm your system as much as some code directly run as root. If you want to make online updates etc.pp. then log in as user and start e.g. yast from the menu. You will be asked for your root password and after that _only yast_ will run as root, not your whole KDE. You can start every program you want as user root. Just hit Alt-F2 and type (without quotes): "kdesu programname". This can be: kdesu yast kdesu ethereal kdesu kpackage If you need a root console, then only fire up your konsole as user and type "su". If a program you run in your root console needs graphic then run sux instead of su. etc.pp. There is absolutely no reason to log into KDE as root. If you think you have a reason to do so, I would suggest that you describe the reason to the list and we will try to tell you the safe solution to the problem. Greets and have fun, Daniel