I cannot login in after a fresh install, don't know root password, and it never asked me to create a user

Ewan Mac Mahon ewan at macmahon.me.uk
Thu Aug 4 22:01:32 UTC 2005


On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 08:03:33PM +0100, Sir Daz wrote:
> >
> I just prefere to use to browse directories and find files in the gui as 
> root.
But what files? You can browse almost the entire filesystem as an
ordinary user, you just can't change it. Most of the time you shouldn't
have to, and common root jobs like installing packaging and configuring
most hardware have nicely sudoified tools.

> like i said, im not that comfortable using the terminal as yet :) 
That's fair enough, but I'm interested to know what you're feeling the
need to do that requires either a terminal or full root access. I'm
about to set up an Ubuntu box for a non techy family member and my hope
is that she'll never need to realise that the terminal is even
available, much less learn to use it.

>or it could be that im so used to logging into administrator on m$
>windows.. either way i find it much easier to use the gui.
>
Well, it is your system, but if you're learning it'd be a good idea to
learn to do things right if you can.
 
> what makes using the gui a more potential way to stuff up anyway?
> 
Partly it tends to require less explicit instructions (deletes are
always recursive for example), partly there's less information (You're
in a directory called 'ewan', but is it /home/ewan /tmp/ewan or
/var/spool/mail/ewan?), and partly the risk of bugs - bash is small(ish)
and well tested for use as root, nautilus is not. 

As a general principle it is good practice to minimise privelege; that
is, use the minimum level of privelege required (eg running mail servers
as a special mail group rather than as root) and running the minimum
amount of software with priveleges (eg when installing packages run
apt-cache as a normal user, and only use root for apt-get). That way the
stuff ups, when they inevitably happen, have the minimum fallout.

Ewan
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