Dan Dman's questions

Just installed a minimal ubuntu 12.04, then installed xfce4 and xinit from the command line after first boot. Totally vanilla installation afaik.

I'm noticing that sudo caches the password until I issue sudo -k to clear it.

This is unexpected behavior in my mind. I've run xfce4 before and don't recall credential caching being on, nor have I experienced it in the many previous ubuntu installs I've had over the years.

Is this a new feature of Ubuntu? Is this something that's the result of the minimal install? Is this an xfce default that's been added recently?

When I run a program from the console, e.g.

me@box:~$ firefox

I expect the console to log error messages (I think this is std out or std err?) and other items from the program, firefox in this case.

But today I notice that bash just opens the program and goes to a new prompt, e.g.

me@box:~$ firefox
me@box:~$

How do I launch a program from bash such that error messages will be written to the console?

Why is it that some programs operate this way by default and others (firefox) do not?

After the recent upgrade to 12, I notice permanent connections to canonical servers.

Running netstat -tp gives:

Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name

mulberry.canonical:http CLOSE_WAIT  6537/ubuntu-geoip-p

alkes.canonical.co:http CLOSE_WAIT  6667/python     

alkes.canonical.co:http CLOSE_WAIT  6667/python     

Why are there permanent connections and how could I stop this behavior?

And if this is intentional, who is responsible?

I would like to understand why this was done because to me it seems like a bad idea.