Yeah, lets refrain from asking for information for such purposes. If the user really wants to give this information out, LinuxQuestions.org is not responsible for what you post here and what happens thereafter if anything does happen, etc.

Regards.

So if a person was running as root (hypothetically) and they wanted to stop, is there a way to copy all the desktop settings of the root account to a user account? This includes backgrounds, fonts, icons etc. in KDE.

Not sure whether any of the config files for
KDE store absolute path-/filenames ... if they
don't a simple
should do ;)

If they do you'll have to think about some
major awk'ing ;) after the cp

Cheers,
Tink

Dang it, there's no good reason to be root anymore!!!!!!! I feel so alone... Oh well, I guess I just love to have the power of "do or die". rm -rf * is just waiting to be called. Oh and by the way, once you have MSN (what were we thinking?) Internet you know why I would say "DOWN WITH NAT!!!".....

I would call that naive. Next time you complain hotmail.com is down, I don't want to hear you Prepare to receive a nice bill with the post, an investigation why your machine has been involved with hacking, being disconnected by your ISP, getting sued, loosing all your data, being abused for a spam flooding, being abused as tempory FXP board, and DDoSsing all other machines on the internet.

:-|

I don't hate you. I have to reason for it. I'm just praying for to knowing what you're really doing. Suppose you'll get hacked, you wouldn't even notice.

Soon someone types "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda", and don't get too surprised. Your machine is currently vulnarable for a lot of attachs, viruses, adware, virtually anything... because you haven't got any way to stop them.

you've given your all programs, and networking traffic, a license to kill your machine, flash your bios, and overwrite your cpu microcode. (if your cpu supports this). Your machine has a lower security level then Windows 95.. and that should ring a bell

sorry for the rant. you may hate me now.

I'm just copying the entire folder, because it's the easiest way to copy all hidden files.

add the -v keyword to the cp, chown and chmod commands to see what they are doing.

gotta love the command line.

Ok, so I'm am a naive little freak when it comes to security, your right. And no, I dont hate you, but I do hate Hotmail! I just wonder who the other person that voted for "using root" is... I dont know maybe I'll setup another account on Linux now, any suggustions on what I should name it? Thanks all who have posted.

EDIT: And by the way Dosing all the other computers on the net wouldnt work, mine would crash . And even if it didn't crash it sure would take a while take down one server.

Dang it, there's no good reason to be root anymore!!!!!!! I feel so alone... Oh well, I guess I just love to have the power of "do or die". rm -rf * is just waiting to be called.


I use root from time to time.. But i know whats happening and watch network traffic as well as filesystem changes.. I like to have total control too... Root is god...

I can go two ways on this one..

1.. You can learn a hell of alot messing up your computer with root. What not to do..

2.. You would be a fool to log into your *server or other "stable" systems as root and startx and surf the web or something.. This I would not advise.

frankly, im not worried about security one bit. with my un-godly 14.4 kbps connection and using mainstream packages from trusted sources (slackware-current) mirror for the most part. heck even if I got a trojan I'll bet my connection would be to damn slow for them to do harm. lol. but seriously my box isnt that inportant anyways, I reformat all the time and religously keep backups

although i do prefer to do things as a user, but i'd probably say my time from user to root is devided in half, cause my system glitches so much. But hey, every time I have a problem I get to learn alot about the specific parts of my system that the problem effects.

Not. Most of the answers why have been listed.

I always su. If I su a command frequently I sudo

Root should only be used sparingly. I can't take credit for this, but another LQ'er described it something like this: Running as root is like putting on a giant robot suit. It's pretty cool to walk around and know that you are all-powerful and unstoppable, but after the initial thrill wears off, you realize that you might accidentally stomp on something that you didn't mean to.

That's just a great description, and it's totally accurate. -- J.W.

And so that's true, I've got my new non root account working. I still miss not ever having to do su and "Hey Look at this file! Its called <whatever system file>, I'll butcher it!!!" But oh well, by the way does anyone know if Halo (yes M$, I'm sorry) works with wine?

Not running as root for routine tasks is an inherent safety feature in *nix.
Running as root for every task bypasses this.
The common solution to someone posting nonsense like this is "good luck" and no follow up "I told you so" when you post later.
Good Luck.

I run root all the time and yes, I have f**ked up and typed "rm -rf /"