On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 13:23 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 10:45 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
I've been a Linux admin for well over 15 years and I've yet to see when I really _need_ root to have a GUI.
The only convincing use case I've ever come up with is resizing the /home partition using a graphical partition tool; you can't do that with su from a user account because the partition will obviously be busy. =) but it's sufficiently niche that 'just run startx from runlevel 3' is really enough to cover it. or, y'know, 'use a live CD'.
I suppose I'm old school, but I have a tendency to not resize partitions on a machine in any multiuser state. Just don't trust it. LVM and such do make it more reliable, but I'd only do it in single user mode, so GUI is out anyway. Belt and braces, belt and braces (as far as futzing with disks on live systems is concerned anyway)...
I've always been more happy-go-lucky, which is probably why I lost my entire /home partition to an unfortunate ReiserFS resizing accident a few years back. The accident was to try and resize a ReiserFS partition. For the record, don't. :)
(I also once dd'ed a floppy disk image over the first 1.44MB of my root partition. /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are so *similar*, after all. Darn USB floppy drives. It's a good thing no-one's paying me to do quality assurance on the operating system they trust all their data to, really. That'd be a damn silly thing to do...)