Re: Gnome Root Warning

[Thomas Dodd <ted cypress com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> As Seth says, logging in as root is basically a bad idea. Though it's
> true that you have to use the command line to perform some tasks if
> you don't log in as root, I would consider it a bug whenever we
> require logging in as root to do something graphically. It's very
> unsafe to run as root, and not just security-wise; I would expect it
> to decrease system stability as well, because software bugs and user
> mistakes have more impact.

Interesting. I know lots of admins that do it in Solaris and
HP-UX all the time. Then again, They don't have any thing that
asks for the root password when it's needed either. You can
use xhost to allow root access to your display, and su, but
then you have to use the commands by name, instead of the icons.

Perhaps when they switch to GNOME they will fix this.

	-Thomas