"ext Aniello Del Sorbo" <anidel at gmail.com> writes: > I still don't understand why this cannot be done in an easy way from > the maemo team. Patches are welcome! :-) It is not completely straighforward to use dpkg and apt-get with mixed users, but it might not be that difficult either. You would need to make sure that they can still maintain their databases and caches, etc. But, increasing the robustness of the device is a much more subtle issue than not installing packages as root. Not installing packages as root doesn't give you much protection against accidents. (Not _running_ them as root does, on the other hand.) You will also need to prevent applications from doing harm at run-time, for example. What good is it when an application has not been installed as root but still deletes all your image files by accident? Or a statusbar plugin consumes so much memory at a steady rate that the device reboots after 10 minutes? You could make a distinction between applications that you allow to modify your files (all files, or just some?) and other that are just alloed to read them (really? maybe you should not let them read your honey moon pictures). I think that way lies madness.
