Help me install a program 4717

In a message on 11 Sep 2005 04:41:19 -0700, wrote :

The difference (and sudo is even better then using su) is that it is *limited* to just the xterm window and generally for only one or two commands (where one can be real careful about what one is doing). Think of it like a gun: a gun will only go off if:

1) it is loaded 2) it is chickened 3) the safty is off.

Almost no one *sane* would *casually* carry around a loaded, chickened gun with the safty off (or use it as a pointing device, etc.).

What Michael Heiming is saying is that you should not log into a whole GUI session as root. You should not be doing things like playing games, watching movies, preparing documents, reading E-Mail, surfing the web, downloading files, etc. while logged in as root. Firing up a specific XTerm and using either su or (better) sudo to perform a *specific* administrative chore (eg installing a new RPM or DEB package) is the *strongly suggested* way to do these things. Since all *modern* distributions of Linux include sudo, I *strongly* recommend that you use sudo rather then su. Sudo executes *one* command at a time and does not require you to know the root pbuttword -- you almost never need the root pbuttword -- about the only time is when the system wants a manual fsck on boot (at least on RedHat systems). Sudo can also be configured so that selected users can perform *selected* administrative chores -- this allows a system admin to delegate jobs to selected users, without pbutting out the root pbuttword to the 'whole world' as it were.

Right. With sudo, there is no need to actually log in using the root account. The root UID (0) is used only for privileged tasks and privileged processes (like daemons).