On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 01:44, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote: > El dom, 18-08-2002 a las 22:13, Daniel Borgmann escribió: > > Hello, > > > > Hi > > > are there any plans to improve user managment? > > I think this is a big problem currently of GNOME. Unix user managment > > works great on the console, but there doesn't seem to be a convenient > > replacement for "su" on the desktop. This has a critical effect, as it > > forces home users either to rely on the terminal for certain tasks > > (don't tell me that a user never ever has to touch anything but his > > $HOME) or run as root all the time (or relogin as root for every single > > task). And as it is always suggested _not_ to use the root account in X, > > this is a problem. > > I asked someone to explain me how Apple solved it in OS X as I figured > > they would face the same problem. He told me that users can be > > "administrators" and the first user is an administrator by default. > > However, administrators still can't hose the filesystem, so it's not the > > "root" account. But they can do things on the GUI like installing > > software or changing the root and other user's passwords. Whenever they > > try to change systemfiles (in finder most probably), they are asked for > > this root password. And of course they can do sudo on the console (or su > > but this seems to be disabled by default). > > MacOSX uses sudo for all tasks. They have a frontend to ask for your > password as does the sudo command. And we have gnome-sudo that I ported to GNOME2 some time ago :) > > Is there a chance that we see something like this in the near future in > > GNOME? I see a lot of people complaining that one of the problems of > > GNU/Linux on the desktop still is, that you can't do everything from the > > GUI. This might not be important for total beginners or companies (as > > they have administrators for this task), but for the typical desktop > > poweruser it certainly is. > > > > The "problem" is that this change should be done at the distribution > level, not at GNOME level. I said we should add some "front-end" to xsu, gnome-su, gnome-sudo, whatever graphical su is installed, to put in gnome-desktop (?). Simple case: #!/bin/sh if [ -x /usr/bin/gnome-su ] ; then /usr/bin/gnome-su $*; fi etc. Maybe a file in /etc to configure that, so that the distro could chose a nice default. This script should probably tell the user if there isn't anything for him to get root access on his machine. That way, one would just add "gnome-super-user-helper foobar" in the .desktop file, and could rely on that function being present. (probably even better would be using an alternatives setup, like Debian and RH already support). Cheers -- /Bastien Nocera http://hadess.net
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