new to ubuntu; have a few questions

[Mark]

On 11/9/06, Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 13:07 -0500, Mark wrote:
>
> > "Root" and "admin" don't really give you more
> > power, I don't think, than you had in any other OS.
>
> root certainly does. As regular user, the only part of the file system
> you can alter is below /home/username. As root, you can
> alter /bin, /boot, /dev, /etc, /usr, /proc, /sys and so on and so forth.
> Changes to these can have fundamental effects on the installed and even
> the running system (via /proc and /sys)


I was trying to compare the roles of Root and Admin to similar roles or
levels of access on different systems -- say, the power I had running
Macintosh OS 9 a few years ago.  As the sole and only user of the computer,
I was Root and Admin combined.  I could do any number of "irreversible"
things that would affect how (or whether) the operating system functioned.
Except, of course, the OS had some built-in safeguards that encouraged me to
be a little more intentional and precise.  (Also, the file system afforded
greater flexibility.  I could install an application anywhere I wanted to;
they didn't have to go in a folder named "bin."  I could store fonts in
places other than where the system expected to find them.)

My point is that in Unix, I can do the same as Root and Admin as I did on my
old Mac from a few years ago.  But Unix doesn't have the same "training
wheels" that the old Mac OS did, so it's considerably more dangerous.

I got a taste of this when I switched to Mac OS X, which one might describe
as just a heavily modded and custom version of Unix.  In exploring the new
folder setups, I kept noticing all of these font folders.  Seemed redundant
to me, so I just moved a bunch of fonts around, deleted others, and stuck
them all in one folder.  And, of course, crashed the system; I had to
reinstall the OS.  (I had, of course, set myself up as an "admin" user.)

Those kind of experiences are why I'm exploring Linux, in fact.  Since Mac
has gone fully over to the "dark side" by going Unix (there's stuff in Mac
that's hard to do without using the command line interface, which is what
the Mac was designed to get away from) and now even going *Intel* -- I
figure, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20061109/7f6e2fa5/attachment.html>