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Re: [LUG] quitting a job

 

If I have to do a lot in "privileged mode" rather than type sudo before each command I tend to do

sudo su -

That puts me into permanent root mode along with root's environment variables.

Then when I'm done Control-D puts me back to lowbie mode

Less chance of making a "male chicken up" than using root mode all the time but at least I don't have to keep typing sudo (which I invariably forgot to do)

Steph


On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Steven Coté <steven.cote@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I really don't know. I have actually just done a reinstall anyway and during
the process I wasn't prompted for a root password or superuser name. When I
was asked for a password for root I supplied the normal user password and
this worked, I've now got a system with the same username for both root and
ordinary use and trhe same password....strange.

Yeah, that threw me the first time I tried Ubuntu too. What's actually happening is that the root password is being set to something random that no one has access to. That way, nobody gets to login as root. It's just their way of enforcing the good habit of never ever logging in as root. When gui apps prompt for a password, it's actually asking for your password, sort of a gui sudo (it might actually be using sudo to do this, I'm not too sure about that though).

The default account you create is created with the Administrator profile, which means it has all the normal permissions of a regular user and it's been added to the admin user group which, in turn, has an entry in the sudoers file. This automatically gives you permission to run any command with elevated privileges via the sudo command.

If you don't like that and still want to be able to login as root, then all you have to do is set the root password, and you'll be able to do so.

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