[ut2004] /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied

[Frederik Dannemare]

On Tuesday 20 April 2004 15:37, Frederik Dannemare wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 April 2004 14:46, Andrew Pilley wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 19:46, Frederik Dannemare wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 20 April 2004 11:10, Andrew Pilley wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 18:58, Frederik Dannemare wrote:
> > > > > Why install it as root? Doesn't make sense.
[ snip ]

Forgot to clarify my point here. Most of us could probably tell by the 
original posting that this was far from an experienced user. To every Linux 
newcomer I always preach: don't be root unless you absolutely have to (and 
the install process of UT doesn't require you to be). We should always 
teach new users that operating as root should be avoided when possible. 
Make new users 'afraid' of root and you have accomplished a great thing, 
IMO.

If we all just tell a user who is having trouble installing something as 
non-root: "install as root and be done with it!" when it is not 
necessary[0], we are asking for trouble and soon we will have spyware and 
viruses crawling[1] all over the place as is the case in the Windows world. 
I'm not at all saying that UT is infected with spyware or anything like 
that, but if we don't teach good practice to new users, they will soon be 
installing/executing *everything* they find on the net as root without any 
concern.

Once in a while when I stumble upon a piece of software that requires me to 
be root in order to install, I either simply delete it, or I will install 
it in a chroot'ed environment and then examine what exactly the install 
process did[2]. People may say that I'm more paranoid than most (this may 
come from working as a UNIX systems engineer for a big ISP), but I really 
don't mind. I'm not the one who's going to get bitten. This has gotten way 
too off-topic. Sorry about that.

--
Frederik Dannemare

[0] Same thing goes for extracting a tarball. Rule of thumb should be to 
never do this as root. The reasons are obvious, although it certainly helps 
that recent tar versions (at least gnu tar) strips the leading '/' - but 
nevertheless avoiding again here root is good practice.
[1] Sure unwanted software like this will be installed onto a system being 
non-root, but you have greatly reduced the potential of the darn thing.
[2] I'm not saying that I don't trust any software to be installed as root. 
I do, but it all depends on where I get the software from. Pretty much 
anything other than what comes from the official Debian archives goes onto 
my systems as non-root.