sound in root

[Gerald Thompson]

Jerry W. Whitmire wrote:

>>Jerry W. Whitmire wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Hi i have a problem as root and my sound system it is
>>>vendor intel
>>>model corporation 8280/fb/fbm/fw/frw/ich6 familf ac 97 audio controller
>>>module intel 8x0.
>>>the problem is it does not work as root but if i run as user it works just fine .when i boot to root it says sound server will use the null output device .
>>>device default cant open for playback invalid argument.
>>>can i get some help with this THANKS for any help!!! 
>>>
>>You shouldn't be logging in as root.  Log in only as a regular user and 
>>use su or sudo to accomplish tasks that require root-level access.  It's 
>>extremely bad *NIX practice to log in as root and such behavior should 
>>be avoided whenever possible.
>>
>>-- 
>>----------
>>Doug Stewart
>>
>>    
>>
>Man this really throw me off track if something is broken as root do not use root. leave it broken and go to user where it is not broken!!
>How far will Fedora get if this kind of mentallaty is used ??
>Boy why did i not think of that myself ??
>Jerry W. Whitmire
>Just a user of Fedora.
>jerryw4386 at netscape.net 
>

Hi Jerry;

What Doug means is that logging in as root on your computer is dangerous 
security wise and opens you up to vulnerabilities.  In fact if you have 
SELinux turned on in enforcing mode your problem could be that SELinux 
is supressing several modules while you are logged in as root.  The idea 
is that root is for computer maintenance only and not for day to day 
usage.  Technically the root user only needs to be able to access the 
hard drive and all the setting files on the computer.

I am not sure why your sound does not work under root, perhaps it could 
be the root user sound profile is not set correctly.

I will be honest with you, I never log in as root user on my computer.  
In fact since setting myself up in sudoers I mainly use sudo for any 
command that I need root privilidge on.  I usually only log in "su -" 
when I am having some problems with yum.  One time when there were lots 
of updates sudo timed out when trying to apply the updates in yum.  Also 
any update to selinux policies seems to work better if you log in as "su 
-" instead of using sudo.  Also note, when I say I am logging in as "su 
-" I mean that I am logged in under my own personal user profile, open a 
terminal, and do "su -" to become root user.  I am not logging into 
Gnome/X as root user.  The only other time I have logged in as root is 
when I was updating my nvidia driver after a kernel upgrade.  In that 
case though I was killing x, telinit 3 at terminal, installing nvidia 
driver, logging out of root, logging in as user, starting x.  Even in 
that case though I didn't need to log in initially as root, I could have 
logged in as user and did "su -" to do my nvidia update.

All the System Preference - gui config files will prompt you for root pw 
when you open them, so you don't need to log in as root to change the 
system preferences.

What it comes down to is that root access is really only if you need to 
configure or change a file or system setting that is inaccessible as 
user.  You should be able to do that with "sudo" in most cases, and in 
the odd case where root access is absolutely necessary "su -" takes care 
of that.

Gerald