Re: Linux ease of use

Thus quoth Adam Ophir Shapira on Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 03:11:01PM -0400:
> 
> On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 00:17, Alex Netherton wrote:
> 
> > My question; why can't the developers of Linux (and I know there are
> > millions of them) develop some way that you can download a file, or
> > find a file on CD, click it and it installs itself?
> 
> I am trying to do exactly that, but I don't get the
> support that I need from the ultra-conservative
> development community.
> 
> And this way, we will finally be able to have programs
> that you can install on Linux just by double-clicking
> them.

Well, there's a simple answer: the Linux community is perfectly capable
of creating an OS that would embody everything that sucks about some
other OS that was sometimes mentioned on this mailing list, but that's
like building guns: you risk becoming a victim of your own product.

The good news is of course, that you need to be root to install software,
and hopefully root will think for half a second before installing the
latest trojan.

A small tip for sysadmins whose 'users' don't need to do any programming:
Mount the /home file system with the nodev and noexec options to keep
your minions from installing software.

Kind regards,


Daniel von Asmuth

-- 
	If Gates had meant us to use Windows,
	He would have given us three hands.