[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Richard Neill]

Jaime Iniesta wrote:
> I'm not sure between Ubuntu and Debian. I tried Ubuntu once and I liked it. 
> What I didn't like at all is all that "sudo" thing, I mean, I prefer the 
> standard way where there is a clear distinction between normal users and 
> root. Can this be disabled in Ubuntu?

I should imagine all you have to do is edit /etc/sudoers. But before you 
do that, make sure you have set the root password!

On my (Mandrake) system, I have this line in /etc/sudoers:

    rjn  ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD: ALL

and I have a bash alias for "sudo su".


However...there is an interesting point here. Most computers are now 
single-owner/user machines (not counting daemons). This means that the 
main user is essentially root. Therefore, sudo is useful, since it makes 
the user think "now I have to be careful" but it doesn't bug them to 
enter the root password all the time.  The other thing is that, to most 
users, /home is far more valuable than /. i.e. a mistake made as root, 
which merely destroys, say /usr is far less serious than a mistake made 
which destroys $HOME/Documents.



Richard