On Wed, February 4, 2015 10:35 am, Scott Robbins wrote: > On Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 08:18:23AM -0800, Keith Keller wrote: >> On 2015-02-04, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote: >> > >> > One might question why *nix distributions insist on providing a known >> > point of attack to begin with. Why does user 0 have to be called >> > root? Why not beatlebailey, cinnamon or pasdecharge? >> >> That is more or less what OS X does. User 0 still exists, and it's >> labelled as "root", but there is no way (unless the owner goes way out >> of his way) to actually log in as root. The first account created is >> given full sudo access, and can choose to grant sudo to subsequently >> created users. (Users with sudo can still get a root shell, but that's >> not the same as logging in as root.) >> >> I thought Ubuntu did this as well, but I haven't installed Ubuntu for >> quite a while. Anyone know? > > Yes, I think they were one of the first ones to do it. I remember thinking > at the time, ah, copying Apple. > Note: Ubuntu was first released in 2004. As a matter of fact Ubuntu is one of the clones of Debian which was first released in 1993. Apple OS 10 (based on opendarwin) - the only one of Mac OSes "root - sudo" talk can be relevant to was first shipped on their machines later than 2002 as I recall (wikiedia is really vague on the date MacOS 10 was first shipped, I have to rely on my memory). So, I would say, Ubuntu wasn't copying Apple, they are just a clone of Debian. And Debian is older system than MacOS 10. I'm not a historian, so someone probably will correct me, if I'm wrong here. Just my $0.02 Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++