[P1] How Often Does Jag need a reinstall?

[lbdesigns at earthlink.net]

On Sunday, February 2, 2003, at 11:37  AM, david wrote:

> Now what many of us have found is that is that OS X - like our old 
> friends
> OS 8 and OS 9 - is sensitive to preference corruption. If I suddenly 
> begin
> to see odd behavior from my Mac, I log out of my user account and into 
> root.

I hope this doesn't sound harsh ...

You should really avoid two things: logging in as root for general 
troubleshooting and suggesting that others do so as well.

It is certainly not necessary to login as root to troubleshoot most 
problems, particularly those possibly involving preferences. It's a 
much better idea to simply create a new user and login as the new user 
to see if the problem occurs. When you're logged in as root, there's a 
potential for bad things to happen ... if you're checking your email as 
root, if you're manipulating files as root -- any number of actions 
could potentially result in very bad things.

Avoid login as root whenever possible; there are few reasons for most 
users to ever login as root -- and most sysadmin-types do not even 
login as root unless absolutely necessary. Only do so to do specific 
tasks that absolutely require it.

It's best not to even have root enabled. (I don't -- and I do plenty of 
things as root. I do it from the command line though, because I often 
install experimental drivers and such. I'm involved in development). 
That requires a lot of caution, and checking what you type before 
hitting return.

> Now I am rather lazy so if I cannot quickly figure out which pref file 
> is
> causing the problem, I¹ll just create a new user account and then copy 
> all
> my data to that new account. But not the prefs files. (Well, not many 
> of
> them.) If all goes well then I know I didn¹t copy the offending pref 
> and I
> go on with life.
>

This is a better choice than login as root.