[Mageia-discuss] beta2 woes and no graphical root (tonyb)

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

On Sunday, April 08, 2012 06:46:37 am Morgan Leijström wrote:
> söndagen den 8 april 2012 12.54.04 skrev  Wolfgang Bornath:
> > maybe there is a reason to login to a gui as root - although in
> > all my 17 years of Linux I haven't heard one. And I have never heard
> > about any sysadmin who did it with a reason.
> 
> Lazyness in my case. Or call it efficiency cause of scarce time.
> I want machines to work for me, do not have all hours to learn everything.
> 
> I can not learn everything, even less remember it.
> A GUI session often have lots of useable tools to see what is going on, web
> browser to read documentation of what i am trying to do, can copy to
> virtual terminal, etc.
> 
> That is why even my server always runs KDE (but not as root)
> 
> Um... when i think about it i have not used GUI as root for a year or so,
> but it was a time saver in the beginning and i might have given up on
> Linux without it.
> 
> This is the few sysadmin hours of an own smalll company owner and home
> server.

A quick google of "run x as root" shows up good advice that has
existed for a very long time.  One example is:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XWindow-User-HOWTO/xsecurity.html

This kind of laziness is dangerous.  Even the discipline of not being on
the internet at the time is a false fix.  Anything that has security issues
can modify the security of the local network, install malware, or
damage critical files, etc.

A shell in non-root X can easily attain root for GUI applications - not just 
CLI instructions.

Sure, it is less direct to look at the GUI menu to figure out how to invoke
some of the tools, but it can be a one-time effort that has a side effect of 
increasing knowledge of the tools one uses to administer a system easily
and safely.

I am not so much in a different position as you are, and I can probably
count on my hands how many times I ran X as root since Mandriva 7.2,
and I think that was too many.

Kevin Bulgrien