[Wine] Re: How to masquerade as Administrator?

[Molle Bestefich]

Pavel Troller wrote:
> > In my imagination, nobody really runs as a non-privileged user
> > account, even though the docs says to do so.  I've run a
> > non-privileged user account for perhaps a month, and that was a couple
> > of years ago.  Hated it so much I've not run as anything but root ever
> > since.
>
> Really ? And in my imagination it's just vice versa. I'm running as
> root just when I'm installing, maintaining, upgrading etc. my system.
> Otherwise I'm just a regular user.

As much as I hate it being so, installing, maintaining and upgrading
is part of daily life on Linux.
At least it is for me, maybe our usage patterns differ.
Either way, I've saved myself countless hours of 'su'-ing and
troubleshooting by just logging in as root, and I've never had a
problem with it.  I'm happy.

Of course, I WILL be rejoicing when the day comes that someone with a
brain figures out that the entire "applications which the user run
should have the same privileges as the user h(im/er)self" was an
extremely bad idea from the beginning and fix it in some way that
doesn't require me to fiddle with privileges (instead of 'su') all day
long.

> Of course I'm speaking about Linux. Maybe, on windows,
> there is another common behaviour :-).

I'm not your average Windows luser, if that's what you're implying =).
(If it wasn't, and since you're on wine-users, presumably you would
know that the privilege system on Windows is lightyears ahead, and so
the above was just a slightly odd remark :-).)

> > If that's what everybody does, maybe just returning 1 is sane :-).
>
> I think it is NOT what everybody does,

Ok, me neither.
That's why the smiley was there, I know you masochists are out there :-).
(Kidding!  Let's leave it at "different usage patterns"!)

> but I think it should be harmless
> for the windows programs run by wine. Because although you run wine
> as a regular user, not Linux admin, you ARE admin of your .wine directory,
> and it is, together with your home directory, almost the whole world which
> any windows app can see.

Good argument.

> > So the best solution of all might be to just have IsNTAdmin read
> > the value from the registry.  The wineprefixcreate application could set
> > the initial value in the ~/.wine registry depending on above 'is-user-root'
> > calculation.
>
> I don't think so. I think that the initial setting could be "Yes" and there
> should be a checkbox in winecfg allowing to change it, maybe on a per-app
> basis.

Yeah, that sounds good too.
In fact, as per your argumentation, it sounds slightly better ;-).