FemmeFatale wrote:
If he has that much of a Windows mentality, tell him that logging on as root can corrupt the registry, then watch the blood drain from his face ;-)
My b/f is a windows MCSE. Fine. In windows you run as root anyway. Even on 2k I run as an Admin.
Now he says he sees no diff from that to running as Root in linux.
I can't give him any better argument for not doing so other than its insecure (he doesn't care about that on a home compy) & that you can reall botch Xwindow. Botching that doesn't faze him either cause he'll just reinstall anyway.
Help?? Convince him? pls? Thx
More seriously, one reason why I barred myself from being root after more than two glasses of raki is that one typing mistake can kill your system. Like you think you're in /mnt/windows/My\ Documents\Downloads and you want to delete a bunch of junk directories with names like ???sefdljvn5+5, ???fdsre8344 etc., so you type "rm -Rf ./?*" Just after you hit Enter you realise that (a) you were in /usr and (b) "?" is a regular expression.
Maybe you could just ask him why he should bother to run as root? What does he need to do as root that he can't do by typing "su"? For that matter, these days 90% of system stuff doesn't even require that - you can just click on MCC and type in the root password.
Still, if he wants to break his computer, that's his business. If it's your computer he's running, just change the root password and don't tell him what it is.
Sir Robin
--
" Like these cutters, and hackers, who will take the wall of men, and picke quarrells."
- G. Pettie
Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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