On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 10:55 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Wednesday 15 November 2006 10:48, Craig White wrote: > >On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 09:29 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > >> >Of course going from such an old version of firefox to a new version > >> >may cause problems....nothing to big I hope. > >> > >> The old version was 1.5.0.8, it was not a fedora sourced rpm. Once > >> you have installed the real firefox by their installer, updates are > >> automatic anytime there is one available. > > > >---- > >most people have the good sense not to run GUI as root > > Chuckle, there ya go again Craig, see how you are? I'm an old fart and > the machine is mine... ---- and how am I? Many Linux distributions disable root login altogether. Many Linux distributions prevent root login via GUI. You know that it is not recommended because that means that every process that runs (which is a lot) when you are in GUI, has root privileges. It means that every script on every web site you visit, be it java, javascript, whatever, executes as root. It means that any script you encounter anywhere, be it in OOo, a shell script, etc. has root privileges. On first boot, you are told to create a user account and not to run as root. I can't think of a single thing that you could do that would compromise the security of your machine more than running as root. I do know of one OS that routinely has the 'superuser' running in GUI - it's called Windows. But yes, it is your machine. Craig
