Problems of a desktop Linux distribution GUI sudo

[Elazar Leibovich]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 9:12 AM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 14, 2010, at 8:49 AM, Elazar Leibovich wrote:
>
>>
>> It can't be that bad, I thought, I can probably only sudo a known program.
>> Alas, in the latest version of Ubuntu the sudoers file says
>>
>> %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
>>
>>
> At least it still requires you to enter a password. This prevents a random
> person walking up to your computer and deleting or installing software, etc.
>
> If you don't like it you are welcome to create an "adminstrator" account,
> change root so that you can log in to it, and comment out (or delete) that
> line.
> What doing any of them breaks, I have no idea and accept no responsability
> for anything breaking.


And that's exactly the reason I don't want to change the distribution's
workflow. This is not a problem for me, I guess that I can figure out which
application is requesting the permission by a quick terminal session, but if
I expect to use Ubuntu in home desktop of a non-power user, and if
(hopefully) someday linux will gain nontrivial market share, that would be a
problem.


>
>
>> In Windows when you're asked to leverage a permission of a program, it
>> shows you the digital signature of the executable asking for privileges (or
>> at least that's how it looks like in the dialog), which is not a very good
>> solution IMHO, but it's at least better than nothing.
>>
>
> That started as an add-on to Windows XP, Windows Defender which originally
> was Giant Anti-Spyware. Not surprisingly, although it really worked, was not
> a pain to have on your system, and was free (as in beer, not FOSS), very few
> people used it. So it was made an integral part of Windows Vista and was the
> number one complaint. There were many postings about how to turn it off. :-(
>
That's why I said it's not a very good solution. Moreover, I fear that
people will get used to clicking OK when those messages pops, and would
ignore entirely what is written in them.
Anyone knows what's the approach in OSX?

>
> Geoff.
>
>
> --
> geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM Jerusalem Israel
> geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
> I do multitasking. If that bothers you, file a complaint and I will start
> ignoring it immediately.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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