Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
- Subject: Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
- From: Michael Urban <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 12:45:49 -0400
Keith J. Schultz" <email@hidden> wrote:
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Come-on, put your thinking caps on ! Mac OS-X is Unix, right ! So
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it is multi-user ! So it allows multiple
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Users to be login at the same time !! With X-windows you can have
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multiple windows login in as
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different users !! So where is the problem ???
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A Q U A !
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Solution make AQUA allow multiple Users e.g Desktops (password
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protected naturally)
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This is not a OS issue it is an interface issue !
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Keith.
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Well, yes, and no. X11 servers manage a single resource -- if the
screen and input devices can be considered as a single resource --
and only one user can `own' an X11 server. Typically, X11 is
configured so that only the user who is running the X11 server can
put up a window on that server (this is enforced through xauth,
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE, etc). So, if you are in xterm, use "su" to turn
yourself into another user, and try to run some X11 program (such
as another xterm) as that user, you will see a message like "Client is not
authorized to connect to Server". This is a security feature --
you would not want someone else's program (perhaps a cron-type
thing) being able to do things with your screen uninvited! It
appears that Aqua enforces similar restrictions.
The only sense in which X11 routinely supports "multiple windows
logged in as different users" is when those users are on remote
machines with their own X11 servers. The fact that the Aqua
windowing engine is referred to as the "Window Server" in the Apple
documentation suggests that this useful feature, currently
unimplemented, may not be hard to accomplish in the future. It
may also be easy to cause the Aqua window server to relax its
restrictions so that a user could run a separate instance of an
app like Mail.app under a different userID from the login; but
frankly, in many years of using X11 on systems shared with many
users, I have very rarely felt a need for a feature of this kind.