Re: [Usability]User Managment

[Damien Covey <djcovey softhome net>]

Yeah, I too think something like this would be useful.  I have no idea
of the security risks associated, but the idea would help me in the day
to day running of my system. 

On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 17:29, Aschwin van der Woude wrote:
    When reading this I had a similar thought concerning Nautilus.
    
    Wouldn't it be nice for power-user to enable in option (perhaps using
    gconf-editor or whatever) so when right clicking a file we get options
    like "Launch as user..", "Edit as user..", "View as user..." or
    whatever.
Yes, also I'd like to be able to run Nautilus as su, that way no matter
what I do I wont have problems.
    Or this option could be presented when the user doesn't have sufficient
    rights for a particular file. 
    It could also be triggered on actions the user doesn't have sufficient
    privileges for, e.g. when copying files to some location on disk where
    only root has enough permissions.
But maybe limit this to a pre-defined list of users.  There is no point
having this dialog pop up if on a system where a user has no idea what
it means.  I'm thinking here of corporate desktop etc.  Sure for those
who are the admin and user of a system it would be great.
    Naturally the user should be confronted with the dangers of doing so,
    but it would be nice to be able to continue the operation after the root
    password has been entered.
I think that if you know the root password you should already know the
dangers of doing so, so this would become unnecessary.
    
    Perhaps is sounds a bit controversial, but it is just an idea floating
    to the surface of my consciousness.  
    
    What do you people think of it?
    
    -Aschwin
    
    
    su, 18-08-2002 kello 23:13, Daniel Borgmann kirjoitti:
    > Hello,
    > 
    > 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). 
    > 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.
    > 
    > 
    > - Daniel
    > 
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    -- 
    Aschwin van der Woude
    Open Source Specialist
    Creanor Oy (www.creanor.com)
    
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