[Sderby] Hello fellow Derbyshire Linux fans!

[Paul Grosse]

Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux - may it be the only time you switch
between Windows and Linux.

If you have come from Windows, you will have been used to running with all
priviledges, alowing you to do anything. The equivalent to this in Linux and
other Unices is running as 'root'.

Don't run as root unless you _need to_.

Tempting though it might be, don't use root.

Use your other account, the one with least priviledges, to do everything
else in. Also, as you are running a multi user system (unlike Windows which
merely pretends to be a multi user system), you now have the opportunity to
set up a 'sheep-dip' account for running your email from. With the
sheep-dip, you have an account that _only_ runs the email program. That way,
if you do something stupid (not that there are many attacks that will run on
Linux) it will only ruin that account. If you set up KMail to do your email
for you, you can configure it so that it will not run scripts and you can
still see what you are getting.

Good luck (hopefully, you won't need to rely too much on luck :-)

Paul Grosse

http://www.grosse.is-a-geek.com/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Iain 'Boris' Lomas" <boris at borisc.co.uk>
To: <sderby at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 4:44 PM
Subject: [Sderby] Hello fellow Derbyshire Linux fans!


> Hello all,
> NEWBIE alert!
> Ive just smashed the windows out of my PC and installed SuSE 9.0, I'll
> probably mess things up, so I thought I'd join you and pick your
collective
> brains :)
> As a newbie is there anything you think I need to know? Please feel free
to
> send me links to interesting & useful linux articles.  No spam please!
> Thanks all, looking forward to my new open source life
> Best regards
>
> Iain
> -- 
> BORisc - More than thought
> http://www.borisc.co.uk