linux and users

Karl Dahlke eklhad at comcast.net
Fri Feb 25 12:04:16 UTC 2005


You should always have a non root account,
and you should be in it most of the time.
That way if you accidentally type rm -rf from /
you won't trash your system.
That's an extreme example, but lesser things happen to me
all the time, all the time, where I'm glad I wasn't root.
I'm loggged in as me on console 1, and root is console 6.
I switch to 6 when I have to do root things, which isn't very often.

BTW, I finally got my wife's windows machine set up with non-admin logins.
Each kid has his/her own login, for homework etc.
And if they pull down a virus, through mail or internet, it does a lot less damage,
when run from someone who isn't admin.

Whatever the OS, you should spend almost all your time
as a non-privileged user.
Period.




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