[Don Pickett]

As more and more of the places I work make the transition to OS X, I am noticing a recurring problem: users are given admin accounts and not normal user accounts. I think this may be a result of using OS 9, where were all admins.

Anyone else seeing similar problems?

[Macola]

One possibility is that some apps (notably Office v.X) run into permission problems when they are installed by an admin but used by non-admin accounts. I had a few problems when I set up a bunch of Macs for a client (this was in 10.2.3, I think) and the least painful solution was to make them all admin users.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by Macola:
One possibility is that some apps (notably Office v.X) run into permission problems when they are installed by an admin but used by non-admin accounts. I had a few problems when I set up a bunch of Macs for a client (this was in 10.2.3, I think) and the least painful solution was to make them all admin users.

Hmm. Seems to defeat the point of having admins and users. . .

[tooki]

Office v.X is most certainly not a program "noted" for such problems. In fact, I've never seen it behave any way other than how it is supposed to.

The worst I've seen in this respect is Painter 7: it has hundreds of files, and it needs read/write (!) access to all of them, so you basically have to give all of Painter's files and folders read/write access to everyone or they won't work.

tooki

[Judge_Fire]

Pro Tools sucks big time.

Digidesign says you have to run it as admin, period. We've spent a few interestingly unixy hours in the terminal hacking it to launch as an admin run process for a regular user, then forwarding it's assumed home (~/admin_user) directory to a shared folder and on and on... we're almost there.

The environment is an educational institution, with networked user accounts etc. so we'd like people to access the software as themselves and not to be able to sudo anything.

J

[Art Vandelay]

Originally posted by Judge_Fire:
Pro Tools sucks big time.

Digidesign says you have to run it as admin, period. We've spent a few interestingly unixy hours in the terminal hacking it to launch as an admin run process for a regular user, then forwarding it's assumed home (~/admin_user) directory to a shared folder and on and on... we're almost there.

The environment is an educational institution, with networked user accounts etc. so we'd like people to access the software as themselves and not to be able to sudo anything.

J

There is a beta version of Pro Tools that doesn't require admin rights. So, hopefully it won't be too much longer before it's out.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by Judge_Fire:
The environment is an educational institution, with networked user accounts etc. so we'd like people to access the software as themselves and not to be able to sudo anything.

J

They wouldn't be able to sudo anything without the password. The problem to me is more the transparency of other users folders –_defeats the purpose of having a home directory.