[ale] Linspire and other commercial distros

[Barry Hawkins]

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On Sep 30, 2004, at 4:16 PM, Jason Day wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 09:21:08AM -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
>> I do not know why they chose to run as root.  In our J2EE server that 
>> we
>> sell sometimes the tomcat user needs to be root to do system related
>> stuff.  I use sudo to accomplish that.
>
> Slashdot did an interview with Michael Robertson a while back, and this
> was one of the questions asked.  His response was, IIRC, that they
> thought it would be too confusing for users to have to enter the root
> password every time they want to install software or administer the
> system.  A lame response to an extremely stupid decision, IMHO.
Sounds very Windows-esque, a la the automatic membership in the local 
Administrators group on any NT/2K/XP install.

Barry C. Hawkins
All Things Computed
site: www.alltc.com
weblog: www.yepthatsme.com


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