Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Run Photshop Elements 3 from a non-admin account' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Run Photshop Elements 3 from a non-admin account
Authored by: Auricchio on Nov 02, '04 11:49:05AM

If I recall correctly, the only thing that must be publicly-accessible to non-admin users is the folder /Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 2/Previews (and all its contents).

Setting this folder and its contents to be all-writable will do the trick.

I completely agree that changing ownership or permissions helps to undermine the security that administrator privileges provides. I'm a 21-year Unix user, and I never run as admin. It concerns me that many of my clients routinely run as admin, because that's the way Apple sets them up.

That said, what we have with Elements is the probability that it will fail miserably in a Fast User Switch situation. The Previews folder appears to be used to contain editing previews, created while you're "inside" an editing operation. These previews are probably temp versions of the image, deleted if you cancel the edit operation. (Or worse, they're the original, to be restored on cancel!)

Why is this a problem? Let's say I'm running Elements and I go into an edit. You come along, use FUS to switch to your account, fire up Elements and do the same thing. You finish your edit and logout, so I can resume. What happens to my preview? Is it your image? Is it still mine? Is it corrupted by some combination of our image data?

I haven't tried this.

Bad...really, really bad. This is the classic "multithread violation" that occurs within a program, when one has a single copy of a global variable and multiple threads that run through the code simultaneously. Only here it's happening on a "meta" level---with global files.

---
EMOJO: mojo no longer workin'



[ Reply to This | # ]
never mind...
Authored by: Auricchio on Nov 02, '04 11:53:56AM

Never mind what I said about it being a problem. I couldn't find any files created in the Preview folder during an edit.

It's still wrong for them to require write access to that folder, but perhaps my conjecture about a failure is unfounded.

---
EMOJO: mojo no longer workin'



[ Reply to This | # ]