Yes, I'm the administrator, but I'm also the only user. Been that way since
the beginning, earlier this year ... but the no-authentication business only
started recently, about the time of my first post on this topic. before that,
I was always asked to authenticate. Terminal _always_ demand authentication.
Mine is an upside-down organzation: five installations and only one user.
Just being paranoid about hardware availability.
Over my 56 year career since my undergraduate days my computer needs have
been generally modest, but the workable systems keep getting yanked out of my
grasp.
As an example, my company's 1st PC in 1985 was an IBM PC-XT running DOS, and
my word-processing S/W was DisplayWrite 3. After a couple of years I happened
upon a computer store that was demonstrating the new edition of DisplayWrite,
but it was a completely different S/W with different menus and an unfamiliar
"look & feel." Eventually we got a PC-AT and I had to commission a
cooperative fellow in the UK to modify DisplayWrite 4 (thankfully working
more-or-less just like DisplayWrite 3) to run on the PC-AT. Cost about 3X as
much as just clenching my teeth and learning DisplayWrite 6 (the utterly new
S/W) but it worked great. Then came Windows 3.11 which set me off by just up
& calling the mother ship whenever it felt like it. And on & on while all I
was doing 98% of the time was writing reports. I got tired of all that and
started to try to use linux around Y2K. Installation was a nightmare of
conflicting instructions but it was stable. Installing new versions of linux
was worse and usually cost the company more than a new PC just to keep on
writing reports. Now we have the polar opposites of Windows and GNU/Linux
(particularly Trisquel !) ... Windows with its automatic updates which stop
me dead in my tracks at all the worst times, especially McAfee, which
eradicated my T-bird Inbox once (which I was able to restore from my linux
version of T-bird running on another PC). Now you may be able to see why I'm
worried about Software Updater, even though the automaticity does _not_
extend to doing so whenever it feels like it, because it still has to wait
for me to initiate the update process.
