On 4/2/2010 4:30 PM, * JeffM: > Paul wrote: >> I also don't see why every one is so worried about viruses, zombies, etc. >> > When you use an OS that has you always running as root > (e.g. the standard version of Puppy), > drive-by infections and the ability of any user to bork the OS > are constant worries. > > The logical solution is to get an OS that has proper user levels. > There has been a Puplet with this feature since November 2009.
Puppy gets away with it because it's an explicitly single-user system. There *aren't* other users to bork the OS. If Puppy was a shared system, that would be an issue, but if you expect others besides you to ever use the box, Puppy isn't what you run. (I've seen discussions on the Puppy forum who want to set up the system so others like family members can use it. That's not a simple task.) And the likelihood of "drive by infections" is minimal, considering that it's a Linux system, and by default uses SeaMonkey 1.1X as the browser/email client. If you think about it, MS-DOS, and Windows up to Vista used the "the logged on user is administrator with all powers" approach. Vista caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth because it defaulted to a "power user" profile and required "run as admin" settings for many things people were used to doing, but it's arguably what Windows should have done to begin with. I run Puppy, as well as Ubuntu 9.10 on an old Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 with an 867mhz Crusoe processor, 256MB RAM, and a 40GB UDMA 4 HD. I got Puppy because I was looking for a distro that would actually run acceptably on limited hardware. Puppy does, more or less. I originally installed Xubuntu along with Puppy, but it was snail slow. Wiping the partition, reformatting as ext4, and installing Ubuntu from the MinimalCD to get a bare bones command line instalaltion, then grabbing Xfce4 and other preferred packages with apt-get produced a system that isn't as sprightly as Puppy, but is usable if I'm patient. I have static builds of SM 1.1.19 and 2.04, and Opera 10.10 installed under Puppy, as well as Google Chrome 5.0 Beta, Firefox 3.6 and a few other things like Midori and Dillo installed. To the extent I browse from the Puppy box, I use SM 1.1.19. FF 3.6 is my preferred browser on my desktop, bit it's just too bag and slow on the Puppy box (it takes over 30 seconds just to load, and is sluggish once up.) SeaMonkey 2.04 isn't much better. Unfortunately, current versions of Mozilla products just aren't suitable for lower end kit. They need more horsepowwer than the box is likely to have. Puppy tends to get installed on lower end hardware that things like Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu are simply too much for. (My Puppy box is about in the middle of what is run in Puppy land. There are machines with 200mhz CPUs and 64MB RAM successfully running versions of Puppy. Try that with most distros, and see how far you get.) I started using *nix in the 80's with AT&T System V Release 2, and have used a variety of flavors since. Puppy's "All root, all the time" approach took considerable adjustment, and I'd like to run a multi-user version. (Puppy forum member Pizzasgood's puplet is based on the 4.21 release, and reproducing his work in the current 4.31 release would be a challenge.) So I grit my teeth, and run s root, but security isn't my big concern when I do so. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
