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Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing

Posted by michael on from the in-the-beginning-was-the-teletype dept.

uninet writes "As a writer, the only reason Ed Hurst ever got his first computer was because it was far more efficient than a typewriter, and certainly more readable than his own handwriting. To enjoy that efficiency, however, you need a working printer, and Ed explores accomplishing just that with FreeBSD in this piece."

2 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. bad advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Right off the bat...

    life is much simpler if you login as root and run your desktop by typing startx at the command line

    Uh huh, run X as root. *PLONK*

    1. Re:bad advice by Homology · · Score: 5, Informative
      You run X as root regardless. It's SETUID.

      That depends. OpenBSD has patched XFree86 to make it more secure. Among things they have done is to use privilege separation for X, so not the entire X needs to run as root. They also made a ptm device that allows non-privileged processes to allocate a properly-permissioned pty, so the suid bit is removed from xterm and xconsole. Recently, OpenBSD made X work after enabling ProPolice for it, thus making buffer overflows less of a danger.