<snip
 I hate sudo! Sometimes it won't let you do something and it won't
 tell you why not. I like to be root all the time and then I can do
what
 ever I want to do. sudo is the worst kind of big brother communist
control
 as opposed to root laissez-faire capitalism :) It is an insult to
ones
 intelligence.
<snip
 Paul Lamar

Matt-

How do you avoid using sudo as Ubuntu 9.04 will not let you log
in as root? Well if you own a gun you can also shoot yourself
too. Not a reason for not owning a gun :)

In eleven years I have done nothing with root that I was sorry
about later :) A lot of the critical files are hidden anyway.

Paul Lamar



I haven't played with Ubuntu much..  I'm more old school - having
started with Slackware in '97 and later SUSE.  I use Fedora here at
work.  Each of these allow changing to root.

Files are "hidden?"  How?


Matt-

I think they start with a dot.

Paul Lamar

Paul -

Sometimes your extremes crack me up.  This time I thought I'd toss in
my $.02 worth ... without any gun, commie, or Hitler references.  :)

1) If you can't do something with sudo, then it's time to learn more.
Sudo is essentially root access on a temporary basis.

2) Operating full-time as root is ... insecure.  Personally, I rarely
login as root, and then only to do actual administrative tasks or to
troubleshoot.  (Like sudo, if you can't do it as root, then it's time
to learn more.)

3) Going eleven years using only root is like using Windows - you're
running with scissors. Sure you can get away with it ... until
something goes wrong.  And something always goes wrong ... eventually.

4) Hidden files (starting with a dot) are readily accessible.
"Hidden" is too strong of a word.  It's more like "ignored" when
taking a directory.

Here's my advice in a nutshell (and trust me, there are many other
ways of doing Linux):

A) Use Ubuntu for the desktop - they have made it SO easy to jump in
and go with built-in support for CDs, USB drives, video, music,
Windows, etc., etc., etc.

B) Use Centos for servers - it's nearly an exact copy of industrial
Red Hat without the Fedora experimental stuff.  There are many, many
packages all ready to work with the Red Hat flavors (Red Hat, Fedora,
Centos).

To whoever originally had the USB drive mount problem -

For USB drives, use FAT.  That way it'll work with everything
(Windows, Mac, Linux).  When formatting USB drives in Linux (gparted,
etc.) use vfat partitions.  You may need to occasionally mount USB
drives manually, especially the first time.  They should ALWAYS be
unmounted before jerking them out to avoid insta-scramble.
 - "mount -t vfat /dev/sdX1 /media/usbdisk":
 - make sure /media/usbdisk exists first
 - sdX1 will probably be sdb1, sdc1, or sdd1, depending upon how
many drives you have in your system.
 - I have seen read-only access to USB drives when they are NTFS
formatted and when mounted the first time.

If you want to contact me off-line, try vince at pacstates dot com,
and we'll take it from there.

Now back to our regularly-scheduled ACRE Newsletter.

-Vince Orton