Re: FW: Installation problems.

[Max Karpiak <mxk purdue edu>]

"Coley, James" wrote:
> 
> First off I'd like to thank those of you who responded to me yesterday with
> suggestions on my bad install.  I tried a few things and finally decided a
> reload would be easier.  I've just finished a fresh install of Redhat 5.2
> and Gnome 1.0 for i386.  On the first execution, I'm looking at the Gnome
> desktop (!).  However, I've got a warning message that reads "You are
> running the GNOME Midnight Commander as root.  You will not be protected
> from severly damaging your system if you continue."  As I recall, this is
> the same message that appeared during my first install, and sure enough, I
> serverly damaged my system and didn't see Gnome after the first execution.
> What now?

That which I say three times is true:
	Use root only for administration!
	Use root only for administration!
	Use root only for administration!

If you are logging in an doing your normal day to day stuff as root,
then you're in serious danger! It's very easy for a simple typo to
easily take out your linux install! Create another account, and log in
as that.. Use root only when you've got some administrative tasks to do,
and then log out immediately.

Why? Here's a system killer typo (DON'T RUN THIS AS ROOT!)

rm -rf . /*

Whoops! One extra space in there, and now you don't have a filesystem!

Later,
Max

-- 
-------------- Max Karpiak -------------------------------------------
   Purdue CS    Lycos Systems Engineering  | "Coffee! Because you can
 mxk@purdue.edu    mkarpiak@lycos.com      |  sleep when you're dead!"
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