[izpack-devel] Need a bit of info on the Mac

[Tino Schwarze]

Hi there,

On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 02:26:39PM -0800, Pierre Frisch wrote:

> I have not worked on this in any recent version of Java/MacOSX  
> although I would be interested as I have a project that may benefit  
> form this. In Java 1.4 there is an API for authentication that I  
> think could be used to achieve the necessary result. I think we  
> should take a cross platform approach to this. How does this work on  
> Linux and Windows? Can you install with a non root account system  
> files? Would that be valuable or is it only MacOSX people that are  
> used to be able to do that?

On Linux, there's basically no standard way. You usually install
software as root. It's distro dependent how you can get root via a
graphical interface. Usually there are su-wrappers or you end up with a
root shell.

Actually, because of package management (RPM, DPKG etc.) there's usually
no need to "become root" for software installation since installation is
done non-interactively. AFAIK graphical package management usually has it's
own method to request root privileges (e.g. asking for password, then
using su).

Bye, Tino.