What is SELinux, do I need it?

[xdunlapx]

I searched the forum for what SELinux is and came up with old outdated threads that link to pages on sites that have been moved or deleted.

What is SELinux and why do I need it? I'm new to Fedora, btw. Just trying to find out why I keep getting errors that SELinux picks up. Are they errors I need to fix? It's a fresh install of F16 gnome with cinnamon installed and that's what I'm using (cinnamon).

[nonamedotc]

SELinux - Secutiry enhanced Linux. You can look at this Wikipedia page on SELinux.

Is SELinux needed? Well, that's a personal choice. I have it enabled - I am of the opinion that it is an excellent security measure, although a little irritating at times ==> which you see!

My suggestion would be read more SElinux and then decide based on your needs. Cheers.

[flyingfsck]

SELinux is a form of Mandatory Authentication. It was originally mainly targeted at government users and can be configured to allow a single machine to process messages and files with different classification levels - a practice which is normally not allowed. It has since also found a niche in general purpose servers.

On a desktop system, you probably do not need it. One could so far as to say that if you have to ask, then you should not use it.

[george_toolan]

Usually it should be working out of the box and then there is no reason not to use it ;-)

So what exactly did you do and what is the error message?

[xdunlapx]

Well I haven't had it run in regular Gnome Fedora 16 but when I had the XFCE spin it was really annoying. I don't recall the error messages. They were over my head. Had something to do with python I think.