Re: the future of GNOME Applets

[Stephane Demurget <stephane demurget free fr>]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 10:58 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> A laptop system will likely be configured for this to not be the case.
> If I handed out a laptop running Linux to employees here, I'd definitely
> do that.  Laptops are usually single-user systems and it's not like
> adjusting the policy is going to severely damage anything.  (Assuming
> the available policies _are_ locked down.)
I just did as you said in emifreq (http://zzrough.free.fr/emifreq.php) and I have added lockdown
for potential "administrator" (well, people who don't want to be modified) to prevent this
(plus you can simply not start the daemon and you're ok). But otherwise, there should be no harm
using a fixed protocol daemon (plus the cpufreq governors have a range of scaling frequencies, just like the CPU itself)
> The applet could provide a menu of the policy options.  When one is
> clicked, an external tool is run to do the actual change.  This tool
that's what I did.
> can, on systems that are designed that actually care about ease-of-use,
> use something like console-helper - it'll either just do its job without
> any complaint (and the applet will be updated to reflect the new
> policy), or it'll popup the authentication dialog to pester users about
> the root password.  (or the user password, or whatever policy the admin
> has configured.)
you should see the above link, I think security wise, such a little daemon can't do more harm than auth dialog.

cheers,

--Stef