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.
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.
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.
So you are asking for all this commands in linux. If you are not that attracted to the command line, then why would you do that on the command line?
Well, James offered to teach me how to do these things on the command line. In fact, I'm a keyboard guy, not a mouse guy. So I'm okay with doing stuff on Konsole, so long as I know the commands and stuff. Sometimes it's faster too, but I need to get experienced. This is the first time I'm running a real working Linux system, and staying with it for so long.
All your files in your home directory can be managed with konqueror. What exactly do you want to do outside of that directory? If you tell me _exactly_ what you want to do, I'll try to tell you the linux way to do this.
I need to delete a directory called floppy_1 under /media. BTW whenever I hit reply, it by default goes to the sender. Isn't there a way I can make it to default to the list? I'm using SeaMonkey Mail on Win XP (for now - I still haven't configged my ADSL USB Modem on SuSE 9_3.) Thanks, -- Shriramana Sharma http://samvit.org