On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 15:29 -0600, iamsmrt wrote: > Ha, so apparently I'm not supposed to run wine as root...oops, it made things work? > Not just Wine apps. Unlike early NT systems (W2K, XP) where the combination of a badly thought-out permissions system colluded with ignorant or lazy application developers so you often needed to run applications with sysadmin privileges, this isn't the case in Linux, BSD or any other *NIX clone. There's simply no need to run normal programs as root (or via sudo, which amounts to the same thing. It also applies to a lot of system services: most databases, mail servers, etc run as normal users too. As I said, its only a few special activities, like system backups, that need to be run as root. You may want to get and read something like "Linux in a Nutshell" to get a feel for just powerful and flexible Unix-type systems are. Linux is not even remotely the equivalent of Windows with a new coat of paint. NT-based systems are better thought of as a new OS based round a mixture of DEC VAX and Win95/98 concepts while both OS X and Linux are reimplementations of Unix, with Linux being closer to the original concepts than OS X. Never forget that Unix was running as a full multi-user system before Gates bought QDOS and renamed it MS-DOS. Martin
