CwF wrote:Why? That's like installing a deadbolt lock in the bathroom door.
After I took out gksu from stretch the only thing I missed was the cool root terminal icon... I use it for a root terminal button not provided by gksu...You can enable the user with sudo to nix the password, thereby eliminating the need for password entry, thereby not needing gksu. For most common needs pkexec is working now.
Because pkexec is a bigger pain than gksu is
On a server I wouldn't need it, actually I really don't need it at all but the point, click, give it a password thing works pretty well for me in a graphical environment
CwF wrote:Did you figure the crash had something to do with the swap file?
I have mentioned I use either a partition or nothing. I've thought of adding a swapfile to the nothing option, but so far survive with nothing. Is the suggestion a swapfile is less stable than no swap at all?
p.H. and I had a short but interesting discussion about swapfiles vs. swap partitions in
this thread. I decided (against his advice) to try a swapfile and I can't say for certain that the swapfile contributed to the explosion but since I have a shiny new Sid install I also have a shiny new swap partition

I've done this task (normalizing about 80GB of .mp3) on this machine probably a dozen times; the process generally takes about 50MB of swap. This is the first time the machine has written anything to the week-old swapfile and only about 35MB was in use when the machine went completely unresponsive (cursor would move, nothing else worked; switching to another console just gave a flashing cursor).
On reboot everything looked normal until you tried to log into a console, which failed no matter which user - login failed to execute /bin/bash: exec format error.
Anyway, about an hour of googling didn't get me much except answers for a chroot that I wasn't doing, so since I'm pretty anal about backups I just decided to blow the thing away rather than fix it. Took me four hours but the machine is running about 50MB leaner at idle than the years-old installation I had before. I'm about 98% finished setting it up, still have to do some kernel autoremove magic (I keep two).
Anyway, sorry for being bloggish - I can't say for sure it was the swapfile but that's really about the only thing that had changed on the machine.
cheers -