[Klug-general] This sudo thingy in Kubuntu

[Mike Evans]

Peter Childs wrote:

 >>
 >
 > PS. Do we need to do a talk on Sudo at some point.
 >

If we have not covered it to death in this thread you mean???

I think we have established:  1) That there are upsides and downsides to 
having a root login.  The upsides are that it is more conventional and 
automatically enables people to use su if they want to do a quantity of 
stuff as root.  The downsides are that by having a root account is that 
people tend to forget the sudo option and therefore you end up with lots 
of people knowing the root password for a system, which may not be 
desirable.

2)  That whether or not your system is installed with a root password 
there are a variety of ways of becoming root in a shell and therefore 
not having to prefix everything with 'sudo' if you are doing a list of 
administrative things.  Whilst some people are - as usual - adamant that 
some ways are better than others, in fact all of them work and there is 
not a great deal of reason to choose one method over another.

3) That if you want a root password on a system that doesn't have one 
it's easy enough to enable it.

4) That logging in on a GUI as root is generally undesirable (for 
security reasons) and so that is usually, and sensibly discouraged and 
often disabled by default.  However it the true spirit of Linux/Unix and 
freedom: it is possible if you really want to do it.

To all of this I'd add one thing.  Some of us are used to operating from 
a GUI.  Some of us from a terminal.  Some of us mix and match.  Wouldn't 
it be nice if you wanted to change your file browser, terminal (or any 
other program for that matter) to 'root'? And wouldn't it be nice if the 
window border went red or something to indicate that this window is 
operating as root and therefore you should be extra-specially-careful....

Mike