Firestarter, Clam and ROOT Oh My!

I haven't post much today because I had to read a lot. I installed FIRESTARTER, a firewall, and CLAM, and antivirus. I read about theses apps before I installed them causing the delay in my posts. I figured this would happen as I went forward. The things I want to do now are getting harder and require research. I have medium experience when it comes to firewall so I wanted to make sure FIRESTARTER was something I could use. If you get a firewall wrong you loose your internet, network and more. The firewall installation went easy enough but CALM told me it was out of date and needed to update its definitions. I said sure, and it STOPPED. It told me I would have to log on as ROOT to continue. Hmm.... I'm new to Linux but more than one person told me not to use ROOT as my daily log on but hey, this was an install on VIRUS softwar, I can see where it would want ROOT access.

Now one would assume to get ROOT you log out and then log in with ROOT (root) as your user name. I did that, Ubuntu asked for my password. I never set one up for ROOT during install. I tried mine. NOPE. I tried (blank) NOPE. I tried ROOT. Nope. Well that bites. What now? read. read read. I did a Google search and found some articles about how to log on as root.

It's not hard but while reading the HOW TO article I saw something that bothered me, a lot. The author of the article did a nice job of explaining this task (HOW TO ACTIVATE ROOT IN UBUNTU ) but the response from the "LINUX Experts" was very shocking. They flamed the author for giving out this info. The "Experts" acted like the author should hide this knowledge from NEWBIEs because they "might" use it as their daily log on. They screamed the praises of SUDO (command line function more later) but none told how to use it. Many Newbies don't like or are scared to use the Command Line. The Experts who responded to this post basically told NEWBIEs, use SUDO (and figure it out on your own) or don't use Ubuntu Linux, we don't want you. One even said "Newbies need to learn to figure things out for themselves". I thought LINUX was an OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY. Was I wrong? Should the Experts hide the knowledge from newbies, else we use it wrongly? Or worst yet FORCE users to do it their way or not at all? Even though some of us are NEW to LINUX (Ubuntu)most are very EXPERIENCED COMPUTER USERs just looking for something different. We know better then to use ADMINISTRATOR or ROOT as a daily log on account.

Here's something that EVERYONE that uses ANY LINUX DISTRO should remember and never, never, never forget, SOMEONE GAVE YOU THIS WHOLE O.S. FOR FREE TO DO WHAT EVERY YOU WANT WITH IT SO GIVE BACK! If a newbie asks you how to do something tell them, give them the warnings and let them have at it. If they break their computer or it gets hack and used for evil so be it, it's theirs to break and learn.

I know "but their hacked computer can be used for DOS ATTACKS, Child Porn FTPs, (insert computer evil here) and that affects more than just them". Well I have NEWS for you, if every Linux machine in the world was hacked tomorrow, their sum would still be very small when compared to the number of MS Windows Systems OWNED right now.

Rant over, resuming normal operations.