Thanks to a valuable advise from Mingus725 the wise penguin, I was able
to find quite few options to put GRUB exactly where I wanted and
installed open Suse 11 on my recent Dell Dimension over the weekend.
Only one thing I could never understand was that there was no sound
support for the default user whilst I had a complete sound support once
I log out from KDE and log on as root. I spent whole day to find a way
to make root as default KDM prompt but it was not easy as XDM and I
still could not find it. I have set permission 777 on all the sound
device as well as related lib and bin files.
I set AppArmour off but I still could not get sound support and it kept
saying that permission denied to open sound card. It is becoming to be
a nightmare. I am from “startx” and “openwin” generation with mwm and
CDE. I have not worked with Linux for a long time. Originally Unix did
not care about limiting sound to particular users since sound daemon
loaded before syslogger. Open sound system was much easier to deal
with.
I can be just happy if I could set KDM to prompt for username instead
of automatically logon as just a member of user group or to find a way
to provide sound to users. Yast user profile editor did not show any
users whilst /etc/profile did exist. But root does not use such thing as
profile therefore there was nothing I can even paste on profile.
I have no need to use any of such privilege limiting feature. I would
appreciate any idea or suggestuin.
> I have no need to use any of such privilege limiting feature. I would
> appreciate any idea or suggestuin.
Because of the way Linux works you DO need the (as you say) “privilege limiting
feature” of both a normal user and a root, or superuser.
You should never ever log into KDE as root. Not even to try to fix a problem
like no sound for any or all users (even if it is now and always will be a
single user system).
You may need root powers to fix a sound problem, and if you do then you are
best served to follow the Linux way of using those powers which is to log into
the GUI/KDE as a normal user and THEN become root, see: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Login_as_root
pinecloud;1899890 Wrote:
> . . . I am from “startx” and “openwin”
> generation with mwm and CDE. I have not worked with Linux for a long
> time . . .
Linux has come a lonnnnnnnng way since then. Having worked with it that
long ago can be both a help and a hindrance. Besides just the general
improvements such as in the kernel, there are significant differences
between distributions. If you worked with Slackware, Gentoo, Debian (or
one of their derivatives) you will find SuSE (and Fedora, a close
cousin) to be very different. Each is a new learning experience. The
irony is that sometimes old users take longer to figure something out
than new users because they are not hindered by old data.
With openSUSE, you want to become familiar with the YaST modules. YaST
is probably SuSE’s major distinguishing feature, and it is great; nearly
all system management is covered, eliminating the need most of the time
to get into control files. Especially take a look at the sysconfig
Editor - SuSE uses a group of its own control files (in addition to
application and kernel files) to easily modify the behavior of the
system. For example, under Display Manager (the default with KDE is kdm)
there are settings for auto-login and allowed users, and you can control
whether the openSUSE theme is used by kdm or KDE’s vanilla dialog is
used. In YaST there is also a sound module to configure the sound card,
and there is also User/Group management. There is also a module for
controlling the init processes and services.
Thanks to all different advises after all, I was able to set system
start as run level 3, edited each level rc there up. Now, Suse runs
pretty much runs like Solaris and standard Unix. X runs from “startx”.
Structural compliance of Suse’X with X.org’s X was surprisingly perfect
and clean whilst many distributions do fail in cleaning up binds in the
process of disabling xdm. Fedora is also somewhat clean in this aspect
but their graphic work (look and feel) are not as perfect as Suse. Once
I ported Freedom Suite of 1997 era and applied system wide in recurring
manner, unwanted privilege limiting is now completely gone. Yes, I
learnt hard way how to modify and recompile pam md5 and kerberos to get
what I wanted when necessary at given # prompt.