James Mckenzie wrote:
> Alexandre Julliard <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Sent: Feb 9, 2009 7:26 AM
>> To: James Mckenzie <[email protected]>
>> Cc: Austin English <[email protected]>, [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: ntdll: add a warning about running wine as root (resend)
>>
>> James Mckenzie <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>> Second, the problem is that newbies, figuring that their favorite
>>> program will not run as an ordinary user, gets a wiff that root has
>>> more privileges, will attempt run as root totally hosing their Wine
>>> directory. This then starts the 'you should not run Wine as root'
>>> mantra on Wine-Users. This then causes the newbie to question why did
>>> I go to Linux/Wine when I had a perfectly running Windows system?
>> Please explain how running as root will screw their Wine directory. If
>> that's really true, surely it should be fixed instead of simply throwing
>> out a warning and proceeding.
>
> New wine installation:
>
> su (no dash so root's environment is not picked up)
> wine notepad
> install various programs and use them.
> exit
>
> User logs in a second time after learning how to properly use Wine.
> Attempt to do anything with Wine in user space. Cannot do due to permissions
> problems.
>
> The solution:
>
> sudo rm -rf .wine
Solution is sudo chmod -R $username.$groupname .wine
> User now upset because everything they did is gone.
Not if you do it right.
>
> Yes, there are legit reasons to run as root, one of them is the now famous
> ICMP 'Ping' unavailability issue in Linux. Experts know about this and how
> to work around it. Newbies, used to Windows and how it works, just figure
> that this is restricted to administrators, and switch to root to get around
> it. The proper command, as I have learned through years of UNIX
> administration, is 'su -' but newbies don't know this and most just use 'su'.
>
> Thus, the need for the warning. Experts tend to know what they are doing,
> newbies don't for the most part. And yes, I borked many a system as a newbie
> and as an expert (building kernels for RedHat/Fedora for my Thinkpad.
bye
michael
