Re: tlug: Question

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Fri, 29 May 1998, NIIBE Yutaka wrote:

> In tradition, the home directory of root is /.  And (as far as I'm
> concerned), the tips on traditional UNIX is (was)
> 
> 	Never use root account except (special) system administration.
> 
> In other words, "use your own account as possible."  Hence, it's rare
> to see cluttered / directory which has "Mail", "News" or "core".  So,
> there has been no problem.
> 
> (Here is my guess) However, many novice users switched from DOS don't
> make their own account, but use default "root" account (forever).
> This sometimes makes cluttered / directory and it can be cause of
> system trouble.  For example, $HOME/bin is usually private directory,
> but in case of HOME=/ it can be public directory.

Also, Linux has some inherent quirks that make root usage mandatory.  For
example, anything that uses svgalib must be run as root or made setuid,
and even making it setuid doesn't work for some of the programs... So I
had to give my wife root access on our computer at home so she can play
Lemmings under the Amiga emulator.. UAE works as a setuid executable, but
for some reason it doesn't like the mouse unless it's REALLY run as root.

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Linux Developer/Systems Administrator for Pacific HiTech, Inc. 
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


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