Ubuntu user's report

[Myles Green]

On Sat, 2004-18-12 at 07:37 -0800, Net Llama! wrote:
> On 12/18/2004 12:28 AM, Myles Green wrote:
> > Hi All, sorry for the length. If you're not interested in checking out a
> > new distro you might want to forgo this email.
> > 
> > I recently installed Ubuntu on my usual system in place of my usual
> > distribution (Slackware) for no reason other than seeing what all the
> > hype was about. Having used Debian in the past (potato), and liking it,
> > I thought I was prepared for what I was about to encounter. Much to my
> > surprise, I found that I wasn't. No hassles, just pop the disc into the
> > drive, reboot, answer a (very) few questions, sit back and watch it
> > install the basic system. After that was done, pop the disc out of the
> > drive, reboot, answer a few more questions and, if you answered 'yes' to
> > downloading software, off it goes and installs updated software (most of
> > it security related). If you popped that disc back in after the reboot
> > it installs more off the disc along with the downloaded software and in
> > about 45 minutes (broadband Internet + high speed cdrom) you're looking
> > at GDM ready to login. That is, unless you elected to do a custom
> > install and set up a server which, I'm told, there are several folks
> > doing and using in production systems.
> > 
> > At no time are you asked to enter a root password, by default the first
> > user created is added to the sudoers list. Now, I *did* have my
> > reservations about this idea but I do (sort of) understand their
> > reasoning. I also know how to type 'sudo passwd root' in order to
> > circumvent that idea (I believe that's all that's needed) but I've
> > pretty much gotten used to just typing sudo before any commands that
> > require root privileges - this is after all not a mission critical
> > system.
> 
> Maybe i'm just missing something, but how is that more secure than using 
> root?  If your box gets owned, now they don't even need to get root?

As a desktop system no servers are installed so there no services
offered and minimum risk. A (several actually) firewall(s) is/are
available. Like I said, experienced users can enable the root account at
will. Nobody says you _have_ to use Ubuntu so, for folks like yourself,
"keep going people, nothing to see here".

No offence Lonnie, but Red Hat and or Fedora aren't for everyone and
neither is Ubuntu or any other distribution. Isn't the freedom to choose
a wonderful thing?

Happy Holidays,

-- 
Myles Green <rmg57 at telus.net> Calgary AB Canada
Ubuntu Linux 4.10 The "Warty Warthog" Release http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
My GPG/PGP public key (9D02F338) is available on this server:
http://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/
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