Running graphical programs as root

[Ray Andrews]

On 07/05/12 02:08 PM, houghi wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 03:11:51PM +0100, Neil Winchurst wrote:
>> This does not often need to be done as root, just occasionally and I am
>> very careful. I have never understood the use of sudoers so that is
>> something I must address.
> It is. sudoers makes things a lot easier. I run openSUSE and was tired of
> typing in my root password each time I wanted to launch YaST. Also I
> wanted to be able to run tail much easier and mount as user. So what I
> added was the following line in sudoers:
>
> houghi houghi  ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/mount, /bin/umount, /usr/bin/tail
>
> I then maden an alias (Placed in ~/.alias, which is read by standard in
> openSUSE. You might want to place it in .bashrc)
> alias mount='sudo mount'
>
> Instead of an alias, which only works in a terminal, you can just run
> `sudo mount`  from the menu.
>
> houghi
<rant>

All this root vs. user, owners and permissions stuff is enough to drive 
a fella back  to DOS.  Maybe it's all written in stone now, but I sure 
wish some genius could re-think that entire aspect of Linux, it is such 
an endless source of trouble.  Not that we look to M$ for examples of 
how to do anything, but the fact is that Doze seems to deal with the 
fact that you have yer' administrator and you have yer' users -- and 
somehow it's just not a perpetual problem.  I'm always being warned of 
how insecure root is.  Couldn't there be some sort  of warning system in 
case some remote person was trying to do nasty things?  IOW, if I'm 
editing my novel with kate as root, *why* does that mean that I'm also 
vulnerable to some hack? Can't my rootness just be limited to the edit? 
Then we have things like VLC that won't let you run them as root at 
all.  Can't I just play a song as root without somehow dropping my 
drawers for the entire internet to see?

Sorry, this has nothing to do with xfce :-(