[sf-lug] Need help with VirtualBox on openSUSE and Feisty (or Gutsy)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ernest De Leon (edeleonjr at gmail.com):

> Aside from the fact that it goes against FHS, your directory structure,
> access levels and security will be all over the place.

Bingo.  (There are also a bunch of minor reasons, but that's the major
one.)

I keep trying to get this across to people, and it's one of the reasons
for the system-security aspects of my page of essays on Linux viruses.
E.g., let's say that I deliberately execute an ELF-infector virus as
user "rick" on my system.  It hunts around for files whose magic(5)
signature proclaims them executables or libraries in ELF format:  It
hunts through /sbin, /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin,
/usr/local/sbin, /opt....  Lots of binaries, none of them writable by
user "rick" .  The little beastie tries its last hope:  /home/rick/bin .
Finally, an executables directory that's writeable -- but all it has in
it are a few minor scripts in shell and perl.  The life of an ELF
infector (unless run privileged) is not a happy one.

As a somewhat related topic, here are a bunch of reasons to avoid
locally compiling and installing software if you can possibly manage it:
http://linuxgazette.net/118/weatherwax.html#1
http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Rants/spyware.html#cultural