Windows OSS Only For Administrators?

Torsten writes "We all know it: it is no good idea to run Windows with Adminstrator privileges all the time. But when you use a normal user account, many programs will not work properly. I have recently recognised that even open source software has difficulties with the Windows rights model. Openoffice will continue to ask for registration until an Administrator stops it. Firefox will not install new search plugins for normal users and will not even tell why. FlightGear starts the configuration screen, but only an Administrator can fly. Have the OpenSource developers problems adapting the windows right model? Or does nobody bother being Administrator?"

Comments

It's not just OSS

[yelvington]

It's not just OSS; Microsoft's own stuff doesn't necessarily work properly with restricted rights. The printer spooler on one of my home computers refuses to work, and in order to let my kids print anything, I had to turn off the spooler (which essentially hangs the computer until the printing is done). I have similar problems with peons and non-OSS third-party software, such as HP's software update tool.

The solution I used...

[TheSHAD0W]

There were a few issues with my software that needed me to consider multi-user access under Windows, especially as I was adding new features; when these features finally came to fruition, I modified my software, sticking preferences, application and temporary data either under the user's "Application Data" folder in "Documents and Settings" in Windows, or in a dotted directory under *nix. I thought this was an elegant solution.

So what happened? People yelled at me. Why was I polluting their system, putting files all over the place? Why couldn't I have kept it the way it was?

You just can't win...

Re:Happens all the time

[QuantumRiff]

Textbook CD's are horrible. I'm the admin at a small college, and we run win2k in our student labs. Even the brand new editions of textbooks use Macromedia Authorware crap (really old versions, and some new) that will not run until they copy 2 files into %system32%. Of course, thats a big no-no to let student users have rights to this. If I manually copy the files into the directory, it still doesn't work, the program doesn't look to see if their already there. Even non-authorware stuff doesn't work right. I have a CD out of the back of a textbook that (from the CD) starts a java-based web server on some port, and then uses IE to connect to the web server. Of course, it can't write those registry keys, and it wants me to turn off all security in IE to run. It uses Active-X, so no go with firefox. .. I could understand this crap on an older textbook, but of few of these came out just this term, and they still expect everyone to be running Win98. If you call up the publisher, their solution is always to add users to the administrators group. .. idiots..