From: Rahul <sundaram@redhat.com> Rick Stuart wrote:I welcome this idea! I have asked many folks about what they like and dis like about Linux and I only get prejudiced statements. If you sit someone ( a familiar and comfortable user of Windows) in front of your pride and joy 64-bit Fedora Core 5 install and invite them to try it out, they will fail to see any value. If you help them find their way to stuff, they will certainly hit a brick wall that you have to fix by opening a terminal window, and then it's all over. Here are a couple of suggestions: Provide an option to configure users with sufficient privileges so that they can enter their OWN password for administrative access instead of ROOT's. ( /usr/bin/system-config-* linked to "consolehelper" ) For a good model, check out UBUNTU......sorry about your toes. Something like /etc/consolehelpers a-la /etc/sudoers.That isnt really a good model. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-July/msg00814.htm
PolicyKit looks interesting based on the discussions Rahul included. Correct me if I got it wrong, but would PolicyKit allow an administrator to set people up so they can do certain things as administrators (like mounting a disk) ? It looked like the user gets no challenge for authorization if they are set up to be able to do that. I actually think that is a problem. I think that when someone is executing with root privileges, they should be aware of it and consider whether they meant to do that. That is why I suggested a [SUDO]consolehelper. I am assuming that Rahul was referring to that as being a bad model. I agree that giving everyone this ability like UBUNTU does it is a problem. However, I do not agree that setting policies for a user and not reminding him/her what their action implies is any better.From: David Nielsen <david@lovesunix.net>PolicyKit should provide this functionality the right way. I don't know if we have an ETA on this being useful but I would rather wait for a proper fix than use priviliage escalation that can introduce problems like horrid security . having to audit half a million lines of GTK+ code because it now runs as root and any slight bug could take down the system is my very definition of not funny.