Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 09:37:52PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 05:20:37PM -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
It's also easier to do root-type things while in X without having to log
into X as root or muck about with the Xauthority files.
Which running gdm I don't even know how to do: "sysadmin is not allowed to
login here" or some such thing.
And for good reason. Root should never be logged into a GUI. There is
no good reason for this.
There are reasons to do system administration from a GUI, especially
if decent GUI applications exist for common tasks.
The trouble with doing so, I have heard, is there are features
in X that give a program that is talking to a window on an X screen
to place input in another window ... this apparently was originally
a feature whereby neat GUI things could easily be implemented,
but it the other window happens to be a root login, it's
a security nightmare.
I believe window managers may use this stuff.
By the way, I don't know about now, but 15 years ago, the window
manager didn't even have to be running on the same magine as either
your screen or any of your applications.
-- hendrik
Well, there are reasons to run specific administration tools within X,
but the previous posts were referring to running all of X as root. This
is frowned upon because X is huge and potentially buggy and because
there is absolutely no benefit to running it as root. Whether X apps can
hijack a root xterm I don't know, but I doubt this is the issue in
question because superuser terminal sessions from within X are common
while logged in as a regular user.
Michael Spang
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