[Wine] Alexandre says "let the newbies run as root"

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 10:32 AM, James Hawkins <truiken at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/24/08, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursine.ca> wrote:
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>  >  >  Hash: SHA1
>  >  >
>  >  >  On Monday 24 March 2008 03:47:59 am Timeout wrote:
>  >  >
>  >  >  > Can't you simply start by not allowing uncontrolled connexions to the
>  >  >  > Internet (like adding an offline-modus in winecfg instead on blocking the
>  >  >  > root)?
>  >  >
>  >  >  What reason would one EVER need to run end-user software as root in the first
>  >  >  place?  Wine or not, that's just terrible practice.
>  >  >
>  >
>  > In Linux I agree. In Windows there is lots of software that requires
>  >  folks to install and/or run as administrator. I sometimes suspect that
>  >  some Wine users, nebies mostly, get confused about the difference
>  >  between the two.
>  >
>  >  I would personally *never* run Wine as root. About the only thing I
>  >  run as root on my systems are the programs to install software,
>  >  nothing else, at least in a terminal, etc.
>  >
>  >  As much as I like Wine I am even concerned about running it in my
>  >  regular user account as it seems to me someone could write a Windows
>  >  program that then erases all my Linux user files, etc.
>  >
>
>  There's nothing special about Wine.  Someone can also write a Linux
>  program that erases all your user files.
>
Completely true, but I get my programs from Gentoo's portage and do
not run testing versions so unless someone is pretty tricky about
hiding their intentions or the validation process runs afoul I figure
I'm relatively safe.

On the other hand I fully expect that one day someone with a chip on
the shoulder in the Windows world will start writing  programs
specifically aimed at hurting the Open Source world. It will be a sad
day if something like that happens. Maybe it already has an I just
haven't heard...

Best to be safe and do regular backups.

Thanks,
Mark