Yeah, it’s a simple matter of “sudo passwd root” to reenable root access.
Calm down. I didn’t say Linux suffered from spyware; merely that it isn’t completely immune to it,though it does avoid exploitation in part by being under the radar for crackers, and in part because of the inherent security protocols of modern *nix systems. But there are plenty of exploits on older, unpatched systems. When it becomes more popular as a desktop OS, one can expect to see more challenges. But the developer base will also be more responsive to holes than Microsoft is willing to admit their errors.
I totally agree. Window (of various flavors) all suffers from the falacy of “security through obscurity.” The open source *nixes, on the other hand, invite challenge as part of the development and ongoing improvement processes.
What he said. root is disabled by default, but you can enable the account should you so desire. But there’s little reason to unless you are doing some serious kernel hacking.
Stranger
okie dokie…believe it or not I am posting this having booted my machine with an Ubuntu live CD. It pretty much auto detected everything and fired itself up.
For some reason, i love the default background…it just calls to me for some reason.
Nonsense. Linux is a widely-used platform already. Making these arguments simply shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about and haven’t even read the pages I’ve linked to.
From what I have read already it sounds like basically as long as you don’t do something stupid logged in as root, it pretty much bulletproof.
This comes off as curt. How about this: Linux has increased in popularity over the last few years. According to your theory, there should be a concomitant increase in malware. Has that occurred?
Another vote for Ubuntu. My main desktop box now dual boots Windows 2000 and Ubuntu – at my girlfriend’s suggestion I switched from the Gnome GUI to KDE, but otherwise I’m using it pretty much exactly as it installed. I like it, it’s quite neat, and the GUI doesn’t work terribly differently from Windows. There’s also a fair number of “getting started with Linux” type books available to help people learn how to use it.
There is a modified version of Ubuntu with KDE as the default GUI called Kubuntu. It is still officially part of Ubuntu, apparently, it just caters to those who like KDE better than GNOME.
Installing Kubuntu if you already have Ubunutu is as simple as this:
Gee, I wonder why apt and Synaptic are so popular. 
Congratulations – an easy way to check it out, no? I don’t recall how functional synaptic is from the LiveCD (after all, the point isn’t really to install software packages), but if it’s there, do check it out. The breadth of free software is pretty astounding.
On a tangent (not for installation as the OP asks, but a good tool to have available), another Linux-based LiveCD that might be worthwhile knowing about is for system recovery. They’re built specifically for booting up and repairing a hosed system. Although I’ve never had a reason to use one, there’s a list of recommended ones here. Seems like Wikipedia has a pretty good list of all sorts of LiveCDs also.
synaptic does not seem to be there from what I have explored, but I will look into it.
just grabbed one to play with, if it can do FAT/NTFS file recovery something like this can be a godsend.