What I HATE about F11

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Simo Sorce<ssorce at redhat.com> wrote:
> I haven't done a graphical root login in the past 10 years probably and
> on multiple distribution. Graphical root login is meaningless.


Let me ask you a question as an example to better define the
expectation on behavior that people have on what it means to
administer a computer system.

Can you run the thread audience through the steps on how you
personally go about changing permissions on a root owned file or
directory on a Fedora install to give write access to an admin user..
using nothing but graphical tools as installed by default in the
Fedora Desktop?

I honestly don't know how to do it.  And I wouldn't think to do it
that way. I'll reach for the commandline somewhere in the process
whether it be to configure sudo or just doing the chmod under su.
Nautilus exposes permissions for root owned files but I don't see an
obvious hook that allows me to use existing authorization
infrastructure to gain access to change those permissions as an admin
user under nautilus.  But for someone else...someone new who didn't
waste time learning how to banner attack their classmates logged into
the school's Vax system via a serial connection, someone who is
installing a linux system for personal use and learning how to
interact with that system and is basically their own admin...,they may
instinctively reach for a graphical way to do stuff like file
permissions manipulations.  root login may realistically be the
simplest way they know to gain access to graphical tools to perform
simple operations that the user desktop does not allow.

Its great that sudo exists and can be configured but how do you
discover that tool as a new user doing a self-administered install?
Nautilus is the obvious, intuitive for file management tasks, and if
the only graphical way to get to a version of nautilus that can
manipulate system files is to login as root..then it sort of makes
sense that inexperienced users will attempt to do that..because its
the logic of behavior the that graphical tool UI suggests.  If there
is an expectation that users can work with the graphical tools to do
simple administrative tasks, I'm not sure enough thought has been put
into how to self-consistently expose that functionality.

-jef

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