Re: [LUG] Debian 7 and sudo

On 14 June 2013 09:04, Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I thought I would have a look at Debian so I have installed v 7 Xfce in VBox. Since I normally use Ubuntu based distros I expected the installation to be similar. However I was asked to provide a root password and separately to set up a 'normal' user. Strange.

Not strange - fairly typical, actually. You are almost certainly going to have been asked if you wanted to setup a root account, or to use sudo. Although you are used to using sudo already, doing things this way is not a bad thing.

Anyway, I have been looking at it and I am well impressed so far. But, there is always a but, I cannot work out how to run a gui program as root. Normally for example, to run gedit as root I would enter gksudo gedit. I would be asked for the password and away we go.

Gksudo is not recognised in Debian. Also, in a terminal, I can't seem to use sudo.

Any experts out there please, who can set me on the right track?

Thanks

Neil

The command you are looking for is "su". If you enter it as is, it will try and Switch User to the root account, you can (if you have more than one user account) use su to change between them. It will ask for a password - this is the password of the account you're switching TO, so in this case you'd need to enter the root password you set when you installed the system.

You can always re-sudo-ify your system if you find you really can't get on with it, but I would recommend you keep at it for a little while.

Grant.