Vote for new Ubuntu Feature

[Chanchao]

On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 03:42 -0600, mtyoung wrote:

> Not being able to login as root user in Ubuntu is a pain.

No, it's a security feature. :)  Logging in as root would mean that
*everything* runs as root, including your web browser and everything
else. The slightest bug in Firefox or one of its plugins would lead to
horrific Microsoftesque disaster scenarios.

However:

> The feature I propose is that every time Ubuntu won't let you do 
> something because you're not the root user or owner of something, it 
> should give you the opportunity to enter your password.

I can see that would be useful.  More often than not for a personal
computer you *ARE* the administrating user, but dragging and dropping
files is harder than it could be.   The warning & password
acknowledgement should still be there though in case you accidentally
overwrite or remove important system files.

Note that there's a Nautilus extention that you can download from the
repositories that will give you the option to right-click a folder and
select 'open as administrator'.     That's still a little bit weird
because you can't drag & drop between windows when one window is run as
root (sudo) and the other one as a normal user.

Cheers,
Chanchao