Disabled root - by default; up2date more annoying

[Colin Charles]

Hi all, some thoughts on end-user improvements follow.

As the Linux uptake becomes greater, and Fedora becomes way more
popular, and the clueless getting by their daily work as root happens,
its only a little while before we have a major "Linux mydoom" styled
virus attack (which will give us bad media coverage!).

A while back on irc, mharris was also mentioning that folks might not
upgrade their software; so even if up2date blinks nastily, nothings
going to happen (from a user perspective). 

So, my proposals:

1. Follow the Mac OS X style of disabling a root login by default.
Enable sudo, and the first account that gets created thru the firstboot,
gets sudo privileges. Thoughts?

2. up2date blinks a little red icon at the bottom of the screen provided
you have a Net connection. *If* a user scrolls across it, it says "30
updates available" for example.

How does the typical end-user know what to do? During the user's entire
usage of Fedora, (s)he will be having the little blinking red icon! My
proposal is to make a pop-up, literally telling you "up2date has found
30 packages".

And give a selection list (like what up2date currently provides), and
then let the user choose. This can happen once a week once (or at some
other time interval), and this ensures that the system is always
generally, updated.

This may seem like a noisy approach, but if we're targetting the desktop
end-user, its probably worthwhile. (Again, stolen from Mac OS X).

Thoughts, comments?
-- 
Colin Charles, byte at aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/ - Fedora News Updates