Redhat rant/review

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Clinton 
> 
> Brian Densmore wrote:
> 
> | Also so 'su -' is how to get su to load roots env. Seems 
> that Mandrake
> | and gentoo do this by default. Oh well, good info to have. ;)
> 
> Actually, they don't. This was a great source of confusion for me, as
> well. It turns out that there are two separate places that the
> environment is configured from: ~/.bashrc and /etc/profile (which
> usually invokes /etc/profile.env which, in turn, invokes the 
> contents of
> /etc/env.d/*). When one su's, invariably, the console is handed to the
> substituted user and then (if no other command was specified) that
> user's shell invoked. By default, almost all distros use bash for the
> default shell. Upon starting, bash will invoke ~/.bashrc. On Gentoo,
> there are some very basic environment variables therein. If 
> one invokes
> "su -", the whole shebang is accessed and you get dumped in to the
> substituted user's home directory as though you had just logged in as
> that user. Of course, I'm no expert and I probably has some 
> part of this
> incorrect.
Same thing in Mandrake. If you su, it executes the ~/.bashrc changing
the path string in the environment, but still retaining some environment
variables of the user. But if I su - then it is like logging in as root
and the entire environment is set to root's. But RH doesn't seem to call
the ~/.bashrc so when I type ifconfig it comes back and says ifconfig not
found. It's rather irritating, but maybe they have a good reason for it.
I'll explore it more later. I won't be trying Fedora though. At least not
on any box I want to be stable. ;)
Of course I'll need to recompile most of the packages for a Pentium so it runs
as fast/faster as my Mandrake did by default. Although my Mandrake wouldn't
run on anything less than a Pentium class CPU and the RH will supposedly.

Brian