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Consider principle of least privilege in the installation

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First post, by Telordya

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I noticed that with the current version, 0.72, the Windows installer installs the DOSBox shortcuts only in the current user start menu. But I think it should be installed instead in the All Users start menu, to follow the principle of least privilege. With WinXP and earlier, it's was ok because most people ran with admin privileges by default. But now with Vista and Win7 which begin to adopt by default LUA (was about time!!) like Mac OS and Linux, the DOSBox installer should adapt too.

I think and hope you already considered that, but I found nothing talking about that in the forums. It's really only a small fix. Here's what should be done for the next version:

  • install by default the DOSBox shortcuts in the All Users start menu
  • modify the executable to use by default the dosbox.conf in the C:\Documents and Settings\[current user]\Application Data\DOSBox or C:\Documents and Settings\[current user]\My Documents\DOSBox folder
  • modify the executable or add a parameter in dosbox.conf to specify the capture folder

This way, the executables folder will always be read-only with a LUA, just like in Linux. More security and better management.

Reply 2 of 12, by DosFreak

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Yeah the "current" version of DOSBox offered v0.72 was released in Aug 2007. The config issue with Vista was known even then but it wasn't much of a concern due to low amount of Vista users and higher priorities.

It remains to be seen how many users will complain after the new version is released on how they can't find their .conf file, say screw it and use a .conf in the Program Files Anyway or just give up because DOSBox is too "hard". heh. That's the beauty of freedom.

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Reply 5 of 12, by MiniMax

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Telordya wrote:

A good idea too would be to popup a message after the installation to tell where is the "new" configuration file.

DOSBox will display the path to whatever configuration file it is using in the DOSBox Status window (which most users seems to minimize and ignore ...).

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Reply 7 of 12, by Qbix

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if you have a configfile in the directory where you start dosbox from (e.g dosbox own folder) then dosbox won't search, nor create one somewhere else. If there isn't a configfile => dosbox will use the userspecific configfile

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Reply 9 of 12, by franpa

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Can you have DOSBox search its own directory for configuration files and if none are found, create/use the one in My Documents or wherever your storing the config files now? BSNES does something like this... By default it creates/uses a config file stored in your Application Data folder unless a blank file is created in the BSNES folder with the appropriate name/extension, in which case it uses that file instead.

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