On 27 Oct 2002, 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
One thing is the possibility of security bugs. If a program (like a browser) has a bug that lets scripts read (or even worse: write) any file, if you run as a normal user, the only files that are at risk are the files belonging to that specific user. If you run as root, the entire system is at risk. Regards Ole