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<div class="sect1" title="History and Prior Art">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
<a name="polkit-spec-history"></a>History and Prior Art</h2></div></div></div>
<p>
      Traditionally UNIX-like operating systems have a clear
      distinction between ordinary unprivileged users and the almight
      and powerful super user 'root'.  However, in order for a user to
      access and configure hardware additional privileges and rights
      are needed. Hitherto, this have been done in a number of often
      OS-specific ways. For example, Red Hat based systems usually
      grant access to devices to a user if, and only if, the user is
      logged in at a local console. In contrast, Debian-based systems
      often relies on group membership, e.g. users in the 'cdrom'
      group can access optical drives, users in the 'plugdev' group
      can mount removable media and so on.
    </p>
<p>
      In addition, access was not only granted to devices; Red
      Hat-based systems, for example, provides a mechanism to allow a
      user at a local system to run certain applications (such as the
      system-config-* family) as the super user provided they could
      authenticate as the super user (typically by entering the root
      password using a graphical utility). Other distributions rely on
      sudo (with various graphical frontends) to provide similar
      functionality. Both the pam-console and sudo approaches doesn't
      require applications to be modified.
    </p>
<p>
      Finally, some classes of software (such as HAL, NetworkManager
      and gnome-system-tools) utilizes IPC mechanism (typically D-Bus)
      to provide a very narrow and well-defined subset of privileged
      operations to unprivileged desktop applications. It varies what
      mechanism is used to deny users.
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