Torvalds Calls OpenSUSE Security 'Too Intrusive' 311
jfruh writes "The balance between security and ease of use is always a tricky one to strike, and Linux distros tend to err on the side of caution. But no less a luminary than Linus Torvalds thinks openSUSE has gone too far. When his kid needed to call from school for the root password just so he could add a printer to a laptop, that's when Linus decided things had gone off the rails."
Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, newfangled drivers in the kernel... Back in the day, we had to manually pull the bits out of the computer, put them in a bucket, and transport them to the printer manually!
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean sneakernet? That's nothing.
Back in the day, we had to manually place dots onto the paper using a handheld carbon-marking device.
On the plus side, it did have an undo function built right into the final product.
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
Papyrus? Pah! Youngsters! Back in my day, we had to find a granite boulder to carve the letters into. With a herring!
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That only works with frozen herring.
Are the frozen herring red by any chance? I've been looking for one forever but can never quite seem to find it.
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
Are the frozen herring red by any chance? I've been looking for one forever but can never quite seem to find it.
Wild geese are known to hunt herrings of that colour. What you should do is look for a wild goose and follow it to see where it goes. That will surely be the best fishing spot for you.
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
Pheromone Trails, are you kidding me, back in my day we used to have to encode chemical messages in our DNA over many generations before we could pass them on to our offspring.
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Funny)
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In my day we had to invent writing, hew a stone from the quarry, and wear the letters into the tablet by rubbing it with our noses. And if we handed it in late you'd have to write it out a hundred times before the morning. It was so bad we would still be working on our first grade when we died of old age. They thing is, tell that to the kids to day and do they believe you?
No!
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Back in the day? People using FreeBSD are still doing that shit. And yet they'll claim that their OS is superior to any Linux distribution in any way. Except, you know, in the case of usability for a desktop, in which case it's a fucking catastrophe.
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"stuff that does the dirty work for you automatically"
ahh, the Windows method. Works great until something breaks.
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Insightful)
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More like "you bought the wrong one, so suck-it-up and learn from your mistakes"
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Informative)
There's some different issues here. Postscript (or PDF) printers are definitely superior to others, for good reason: they accept documents in a standardized format, and don't require special drivers. The only "drivers" needed are extremely simple, mainly to tell CUPS how many trays your printer has, and let you select the input and output trays, select duplexing, stuff like that.
Drivers that don't accept Postscript (or at least some other de facto standard like HP's PCL) have to have special drivers to convert your PS/PDF file into something the printer can understand, which isn't just a document description language, but rather something more like machine code to tell the printer exactly how to move the print head around and spray ink--these cheapo printers don't have much in the way of processing power, and rely on the host to do the processing for it. This means you need a special driver (which doesn't necessarily mean kernel driver, usually these printer drivers just run in userspace), which of course has to be supplied by the manufacturer since they're the only ones who really know how the printer works inside. Everyone even semi-knowledgable about computers should know by now that relying on mfgrs to supply drivers for Linux is generally a losing proposition, so these el cheapo printers should be avoided at all costs.
Setting up Linux to print to any decent office printer is usually a very simple affair: just find the printer, then select the manufacturer and model from the huge lists provided by CUPS, and off you go. Whether it's an HP LaserJet, a Ricoh, a Xerox, etc., it can print to any of these things. But a $30 piece of shit inkjet? Forget it. This has been the case for as long as $30 inkjets have been around, and hasn't changed, and it probably isn't going to change either, unless at some point in the future MS's near-monopoly collapses and Linux desktop systems start becoming popular (sort of like the way that many different phone makers sell their phones with different versions of Android on them, and these are doing quite well in the marketplace).
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Informative)
And it really shouldn't be that hard. If you make a print driver for Mac OS X, you likely already have a CUPS ppd created.
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Sometimes I love HP for making things so damn simple!
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Informative)
Setting up Linux to print to any decent office printer is usually a very simple affair: just find the printer, then select the manufacturer and model from the huge lists provided by CUPS, and off you go. Whether it's an HP LaserJet, a Ricoh, a Xerox, etc., it can print to any of these things. But a $30 piece of shit inkjet? Forget it
Here's a $30 printer [amazon.co.uk] that works perfectly [openprinting.org] under Linux, not that I've tried this particular one. It's more a matter of brand than price, some companies just have shit support and others are quite good.
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if your printer sucked. If you had a real printer you could just cat the postscript to whatever device it was connected to...
And that's why the year of Linux on the desktop will always be next year.
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
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It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
Nobody in his right mind should pay for a separate CPU and RAM and everything else in a printer if the host can do all that, faster, and at zero cost. Rendering PostScript is not exactly a trivial matter. Printer manufacturers do the right thing here. What they aren't doing right is that they do
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Informative)
> The biggest problems with Linux are still device support and compatibility with what the user wants to do.
Nonsense.
The main problems are some notable highly proprietary walled garden holdouts and the dregs of the PC platform. For the rest, the level of support in Linux is not nearly as bad as some trolls would have you believe.
Linux faces similar challenges to MacOS in this regard.
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Linux on the desktop still has its problems, but printing is not one of them. Printing works great, and has for years. There's just a small catch: you can't expect to buy some piece-of-shit $30 inkjet and get it to work. You need to buy a decent printer. Generally anything by HP is fully supported, any kind of business printer is well-supported, and you can also get ~$100 laser printers these days from Samsung that have Linux support. If $100 is outside your budget for a printer, then you need to reeva
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Those HP printers can be made to work great, but you still need to do some serious Googling to find out that you first need to turn off the automatic USB-based Windows install disk that the printer appears to be when you plug it in. Then some more Googling to find out how to do it.
Pretty odd that HP goes out of its way to provide drivers for its printers and then doesn't bother to even warn you about this USB drive behavior.
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Postscript is an Apple conspiracy, designed to wear out electrons by sending too many of them through the printer cable.
ASCII only!
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Re:Only root? (Score:5, Funny)
Postscript is an Apple conspiracy, designed to wear out electrons by sending too many of them through the printer cable.
I think you meant Adobe.
Adobe is an Apple conspiracy! Just look at the first and last letters. Do you think that is merely a coincidence?
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That's why you need a Monster Cable. The larger conductors and lubricated sheathing minimize wear. This both maximizes cable lifetime and ensures that the bits better retain their shape as they transit the cable.
Re:Only root? (Score:5, Informative)
"lp0" stands for "Line Printer 0" -- you know, 132 columns, tractor feed, green-and-white-striped paper, massive clattering mechanical wheels spinning.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
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You could still simply send your file to the printer and it would print, though. And if the file happened to have (the right) embedded printer control codes, it would even look nice.
C:\> TYPE AUTOEXEC.BAT > PRN:
$ cat readme.txt > /dev/lp0
:-).
It was all good
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Not quite. There's never been printer device drivers compiled into the kernel. There were printer port drivers, but that's different; they just set up a virtual device at /dev/lp0 (or "PRN" in the case of DOS), and let you send data to it, so the data comes out the DB25 port on your PC. They had no control over the printer whatsoever.
Those old dot-matrix printers accepted ASCII text input, along with some control codes (other ASCII characters). So once you had a way to send ASCII data over the cable, th
Re:Only root? (Score:4, Interesting)
Too much root is not a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this on Macs a lot. If you want to install anything, you have to type an administrator's password.
In theory, that's great. But in effect, you are giving that installer root access. So if I understand correctly, that installer could be putting any amount of spyware (or whatever) into your computer and nearly perfectly cover its tracks.
Otoh, many Mac apps are distributed as disk images, where you simply drag them from the image to your drive, and that's it. No password at all. If you're going to use pre-rolled software, that certainly seems more trustworthy. But of course, it is a lot more complicated of a process for the average user to be able to ever understand.
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Yeah, but the typical place you want to drag them to, at least to take advantage of the normal OSX UI, is the /Applications folder, which isn't writable by non-admin users by default.
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I would argue that for most users, the place they would drag them is into their Dock. Where the Application physically lives isn't that important.
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If you drag from the .dmg volumes that OSX apps are typically distributed in to the dock, though, the dock icon will point to the app inside of the .dmg, and the link will stop working if you ever unmount the volume.
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That's the huge advantage of software repositories. You give the package manager priviledges, but the OS packages already checked the packages, so it's "safe enough".
Other software (games), can be installed at a user-level, instead of system-level.
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What an ass (Score:5, Insightful)
But no, he had to go harping on everyone on bug lists and social media rants to put people down, even suggesting whoever made the system should die.
What an ass.
Re:What an ass (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What an ass (Score:5, Insightful)
If I understand correctly this in effect would be giving that user root priviledges. I think his complaint was that an ordinary task like adding a printer required that level of priviledge, not that it was inconvinient to do. It sounded like he wanted to administer his childs laptop without giving them free reign over it.
He was also a bit pissed that you need the root password to connect to a new wifi hot spot. Could imagine the network admin's nightmare of having to give the root password to a salesman trying to give a presentation on the road?
I had the same problem with my Fedora 16 (XFCE Spin) box needed the root password to eject a CD. It really sucked that my file manager couldn't do it unless I ran it as root. I don't even know what the file manager's name to run as root and I shouldn't have to. Of course it was no big deal for me to type in "sudo eject cdrom", but I wouldn't expect the average user to know that. Besides, I shouldn't have to add standard users to the sudoers group just so they can swap a friggin CD out!
Remote ejecting (Score:2)
I shouldn't have to add standard users to the sudoers group just so they can swap a friggin CD out!
Should someone be able to eject the CD that you're using while remotely logged into your computer using SSH?
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Re:Remote ejecting (Score:4, Insightful)
Who mounted the CD? (Score:2)
only the person who mounted the CD should have permission to eject the CD.
I agree with this sentence, but I still need clarification: If two people are logged into a computer, and a CD is inserted, and the CD is mounted automatically, who mounted the CD?
Re:What an ass (Score:4, Interesting)
Has something changed, because Network Manager allowed user control over connecting to WLAN back in ... er ... 10.0 I think, or one of the 9. series. By default, in fact. I remember it annoyed me and it was uninstalled in short order, but it worked.
Personally, I'm not sure. I have not done wireless on Linux in quite some time and since I'm usually the only user on whatever system I'm using, meaning I set it up, I don't think twice about having to type in passwords. Being part of the sudoers group means I type my own password. It only becomes a problem when something like the file manager tells me that it does not have the permissions to eject the CD and doesn't know to ask for a my password. The sad part is that I am actually in the "root" group! What other group do I need to be part of? CDROM? Disk? Dbus? I don't know. I'll add myself to all of them and see if that takes care of the issue.
Now, imagine if this were a notebook and I was giving this to our sales rep to give a presentation at a potential customer's site.
Back to wireless, here is Torvald's post:
I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone and adding a new wireless network was moronic and wrong.
I think the wireless network thing finally did get fixed, but the timezone never did - it still asks for the admin password.
And today Daniela calls me from school, because she can't add the school printer without the admin password.
Whoever moron thought that it's "good security" to require the root password for everyday things like this is mentally diseased.
So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.
Re:What an ass (Score:5, Informative)
You don't. The whole point of sudo is that it gives you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user.
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I'm still wondering why a lot of these things feel like only being able to drive a car if you know how the engine works in detail (and more).
Sure, programmers and computer enthusiasts might be able to deal with this sort of thing but anyone else probably will be paralyzed.
Yes, I'm aware there are several distros suiting different needs but the general feeling always seems to be that you need to know one too many things.
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Re:What an ass (Score:5, Informative)
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You don't generally use sudo when installing printers under Linux. You either use the web frontend for CUPS, in which case you're prompted for a password (either root or a user in a printer admin group), or more likely some application in the DE, in which case it's up to the PolKit configuration or whatever arcane nonsense they use these days. And yes, the default policy should be to allow users to add printers.
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You don't generally use sudo when installing printers under Linux. You either use the web frontend for CUPS, in which case you're prompted for a password (either root or a user in a printer admin group), or more likely some application in the DE, in which case it's up to the PolKit configuration or whatever arcane nonsense they use these days. And yes, the default policy should be to allow users to add printers.
This is true, but out of the box, there is no printer-admin group in OpenSuse, and no users are added to it by default. You have to remember to do that, as well as 3 or 5 similar group-membership things in order to make a machine "user maintainable" for normal operations. Things like video, wifi, cdrom, all need permissions or are managed by membership in groups that you have to remember to check.
Left unsaid is how old Linus's kid is. Given the parentage, I'm surprised the kid doesn't already have root,
Install printer just for me (Score:2)
You either use the web frontend for CUPS, in which case you're prompted for a password (either root or a user in a printer admin group)
Why can't each user have a separate set of printers and a separate printer admin group to manage his own printers? "Install this application or device just for me" is something that a lot of these multiuser operating systems have tended to neglect.
Re:What an ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should he have to do that? Why isn't it sufficient to add the user to the 'lp' group? There's no reason that printing should require root access at all.
Re:What an ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should he have to do that? Why isn't it sufficient to add the user to the 'lp' group? There's no reason that printing should require root access at all.
Why does an administrator have to add anyone to anything in order to do a commonplace task on a machine that is really a commodity item?
Not that I have read his rants but I get where he is coming from.
Printer DoS (Score:3)
Re:What an ass (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should he have to do that? Why isn't it sufficient to add the user to the 'lp' group? There's no reason that printing should require root access at all.
Because, in any sane environment, that would require proving that the entier printer-management interface is secure enough not to allow privilege escalation or agent-based attacks. At the very least, that would require a software audit of those components that can be twiddled and probably some pen-testing and/or fuzzing. You can just say "well, this is designed to just let users add a printer so surely it can't be used to do anything else" -- I suppose you *can* say that but you ought to lose your job for that kind of thinking.
We've had large multi-user operating systems for decades now and people still don't seem to understand this basic principle -- if an interface is available to a regular user, it has to be vetted to ensure that it does not allow the user to do any more than what it advertises and that the effects of that are limited to things that the user is supposed to be able to accomplish.
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That sounds like TSA logic!
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It appears you are trying to install a printer I never seen before.
Press OK for exceedingly personal and embarrassing pat down, or READ MORE for a way to just pose nude in front of the web cam, or press CANCEL to order your cavity search online.
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Disclaimer: Webcam installation will require full body Xray scan.
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What a load of horse puckey. This is a kid's computer for school use. Not a system to control an aircraft or nuclear power plant.
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At some point a privileged operation more than likely has to take place. Perhaps Linus should do a little introspection about how his own kernel handles module loading?
I don't use SUSE so I don't know what I am talking about here but it seems maybe the problem is along the lines of their add user script should suggest putting new users in plugdev? Which would let udev(which runs as 0) load the required modules and the default rules would likely make a lp device writable by members of lp.
So it probably is
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This would only prove that OpenSuse if impractical for shared computers, since all users need a root password for ordinary tasks, one of which is bound to screw up.
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This would only prove that OpenSuse if impractical for shared computers, since all users need a root password for ordinary tasks, one of which is bound to screw up.
... or will abuse it to spy on others - read their e-mail or check their browser history, for example.
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"+1 Stupid"
That's still giving a user superuser access when it shouldn't be required. Why open the barn door?
Plus, it likely wouldn't work. Because chances are that Linus' son sits in the GUI and tries to add a printer there, not using "cups-add-printer" or similar from the command line.
I feel you man, (Score:4, Insightful)
B.S. in C.S., M.S. Psy., Ph.D. in C.S. and B.S.*, and my job is to fix the printer ...
* That's Brain Science, you r'tard
In other news, Linus has a child old enough to install printers on Linux ... I feel old.
I guess it's reasonable ... they use to say, "you're not dating girls until you're 21!"
Now it's "You can't have the root password until you're 21!"
By the way, Linus is right, I usually disable selinux ... a good firewall is fine ..., and
also if your child clicks on an attachment from a stranger, that's a grounding.
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Grounding? What kid nowadays cares about going outside. Changing the AP's password is a proper punishment!
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Huh? Capabilities would offer far more fine-grained control over the degree of punishment.
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No internet for a week! I like it.
You can't take away the kid's smartphone, or how else could you track him?
(There is a tool that allows parents to remotely activate their child's smartphone microphone, so they can not only see where the child is, but what he or she is saying. Children: you need an acoustic foam box in your clubhouse.)
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You have PhD in "Brain Science"
what does that mean? I know what you mean by Brain Science, but isn't that normally call Neurology?
By the way, if you had a Ph.D in C.S., you don't need to list the B.S. in C.S.
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selinux is a mistake, but nobody wants to admit it.
There is a way to disable it, but it's not intuitive. You first off have to change a setting in the configuration, then reboot, and only then remove it. Just removing it leaves you with an unboo
No he didn't (Score:2)
Sure, it's one somewhat questionable paraphrase of what he said, but to use quotation marks there is dishonest. His complaint was not even over the amount of effort, but rather of whom the effort was required. That is, non-root users were being required to know the
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Maybe it's a nitpick, but if you employ quotation marks, you are denoting one of two things - sarcasm or direct quotation.
I didn't see the sentence to which you were referring, but quotes can also be used for other reasons like signaling unusual usage [wikipedia.org]:
Crystals somehow "know" which shape to grow into.
or referring to the word itself rather than its associated concept (see link above):
"Cheese" is derived from a word in Old English.
There are references other than Wikipedia out there as well...
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Your citation was helpful. Thanks for the correction. I was wrong to incorrectly mention only those two uses of quotation marks.
That said, wikipedia lists the following correct uses:
It also mentions the incorrect, but increasingly common amongst the un- or insuffici
My hypothesis... (Score:5, Funny)
Linus Torvalds is the Harlan Ellison of Linux.
Ironic (Score:4, Funny)
But... G+ is a ghost town? Just yesterday, people were saying, oh, gee, why would I even be interested in G+? Now /. is pulling stories directly from there.
Mmm Hmmm...
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if Torvalds kid is smart enough to use (Score:2)
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More to the point: if it's the kid's laptop, why don't they already have the root password?
It sounds like "Dad" is being a bit too controlling about the computers in his home, not that the security is excessive.
Re:if Torvalds kid is smart enough to use (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah he can be a control freak, but in a way I can't blame him. Can you just imagine how many black hats would like to get into Torvalds home LAN? Consider also that the man is pulling over 250 thousand $$$ per year wouldn't somebody like to sniff his network?
Geeze, what a drama queen! (Score:2)
From Linus's post,
So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.
This sounds like a post from an anonymous coward on Slashdot!
Re:Geeze, what a drama queen! (Score:4)
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not only a drama queen but pretty foolish too. A business laptop should be locked down. If a user is going to need certain external hardware than it should require an administrator to verify why and do what ever is required for the install. Basically Linus is saying 'if it is inconvenient it should go!' Instead of moaning he should just use a distro with looser standards and not cry about one that is intentionally secure.
Re:Geeze, what a drama queen! (Score:4, Insightful)
A business laptop that is carried five states away to deliver a million-dollar presentation should not have any security barriers that would jepordize that presentation. I would count "Contacting IT back at our headquarters so I can use the WiFi" as just such a barrier.
Clearly, then, this is not the Year of the OpenSUSE desktop.
Printing? (Score:2)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a hill to go up in order to get home.
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Taliban ways... (Score:2)
I don't understand the problem (Score:4)
Installing additional hardware on a computer is most definately a function that SHOULD require administrative priviledges on a computer. Sounds like "working as intended".
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Installing additional hardware on a computer is most definately a function that SHOULD require administrative priviledges on a computer. Sounds like "working as intended".
Except that connecting your computer to a printer is not installing hardware. Root privileges are only there to protect the integrity of the file system and operating system. If you have physical access to the computer, you already have the possibility of smashing it to smithereens, or compromising the security.
There is no reason why a properly implemented printing system should be potentially harmful to the OS. The most dangerous action of installing a printer is connecting the USB cable, which could poten
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Actually, that's not entirely true. Modern printers usually have a control interface application that tells you how much ink is left and what print options are set and so on. Also, they talk back to the typical application in order to make sure that page settings are correct and that your preview function isn't just it hoping for the best. This is especially true of photo printers, which have a whole set of software running to make sure that your settings are properly calibrated when you scan and/or pri
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It's a strange complaint seeing as how even with Windows, to install a new print driver, you have to have admin permissions or know the user id and password of a user with admin permissions. You can add all the printers you like providing the driver is installed, and it's no different for Linux distros.
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He has the knowledge to do the above, but he dedicates his time to developing the kernel, instead of configuring user-level stuff like printer installation UIs and stuff like that. He just relies on some distro, with it's general packaging of software, etc. This time, he just hit one with an anoying habbit of asking for a root password every five minutes. Lots of people can tweak it so it doesn't do that. But moving to a distro with saner defaults is just faster, and more efficient.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You insinuate that somehow his time is more valuable than anybody else's. Also there is push back from the OpenSUSE community that insist they like the current security defaults. Anyway I'm pretty sure he wasted more time writing his little rant than it would have taken to make it where his son could use a printer.
One could speculate that he is just demonstrating the consequences of not taking all of his opinions as gospel and giving it the upmost priority on bug tracker.
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bu the point is, you shouldn't have to. Think about wider distribution, say.. 500 machines.
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I assume you would make a custom distribution with SUSE Studio and install it on all of your machines.
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The link between brackets notes that you're a bunch of years late for that joke. Don't worry, you can still be original by copying a recent troll post.