About the "administrator" user...

[Caraibes]

Hi all,

I enjoy Pardus, seems like a fine distro. Everything works well on my desktop.

The only point where I would enjoy a clarification is this one : the main user is an "administrator" user, kind of like "root" himself  !!!

This particular point has been stirring heated reactions in the Linux world ( see it here, for instance : http://beranger.org/index.php?page=3k&categ=22&offset=0 )

My question is : -"is there a way to come back to a regular user account, without the root privileges, so that whenever there's a (important) decision to be taken, the system prompts for the root password ?"

[Willem]

On commandline youre not administrator, also outside your home directory your are not administrator.
For the commandline, most harmfull attacks may come via the commandline, you always need the su or sudo command to to admin stuff.
This is practically the same with working outside your home directory.
The bottom line of the security discussion is that you dont have to enter the administrator password for installing software via the graphical commandline interface (note you do have to sudo pisi it in commandline).
This is meant to make Pardus a bit less technical without leaving security.
Off course you can unclick this only administrator right in Tasma.

[Caraibes]

Thanks, Willem, for your explanation.

Now about :

Off course you can unclick this only administrator right in Tasma.

I actually tried that, and I found myself locked out of my own root account, despite giving it my root password ! Some Pardus devs helped me out over IRC and it resulted I had to manually put myself back to the wheel group in /etc/group... It worked, but I had a little scare for about 20 mn !

I am not a security expert, so I won't pronounce any judgment over this issue.

I keep on using Pardus, it still gives me good impression, apart from a locales problem that I am going to discuss in another thread.