Salix Forums

With other distros such as PCL and Mepis, you can log in as route.

Why is this not allowed with Salix?

How do I best work with root when I want to?

Just installed it (KDE) and it seems quite a fluid distro.

You use the su command to become root. Type "su root" at the command prompt. You will be asked for your password and after entering it, you'll be able to execute commands as root in the console.

No idea how to enable login as root from the login screen though.

salix555 wrote:With other distros such as PCL and Mepis, you can log in as route.

Why is this not allowed with Salix?

Because it's extremely stupid, totally reckless and completely unneeded. You should never need to do that. Ever. Did I mention it's extremely stupid?

It may be considered stupid by some but I've only logged on as root with previous distros when I'm disconnected from the internet and as I'm the only user of my PC, there no security issues.

I find root log-on useful when I reinstall and want to give my new user account full access rights to an existing user account on my /home partition.

salix555 wrote:It may be considered stupid by some but I've only logged on as root with previous distros when I'm disconnected from the internet and as I'm the only user of my PC, there no security issues.

That's not the intended use of a multi user OS with administrator account.

salix555 wrote:I find root log-on useful when I reinstall and want to give my new user account full access rights to an existing user account on my /home partition.

Use "su" or use a console root login (ctrl+alt+f1). It's really not needed to start a DE to do that.

And there is always sudo.

Myself being the administrator of my Desktop PC and my wife's netbook I have to use sudo and at
times su. There is no way going around this. Just the case in point, I installed the new kernel 3.3.6-smp
and could possibly do this only as sudo. Certain things can even only be done only as su like becoming sudo.

If one cannot login as root, here is the trick. Ctrl-Alt-F2 gives you the console. Login as root.
Do your admin work. Logout and Alt-F7 (usually, sometimes other F?) brings you back to login screen.

Atip wrote:Logout and Alt-F7 (usually, sometimes other F?) brings you back to login screen.

ctrl+alt+f7

salix555 wrote:It may be considered stupid by some...

Some in this context being everyone with a sane mind that has even the slightest idea of what he's doing.

Atip wrote:And there is always sudo.

Myself being the administrator of my Desktop PC and my wife's netbook I have to use sudo and at
times su. There is no way going around this. Just the case in point, I installed the new kernel 3.3.6-smp
and could possibly do this only as sudo. Certain things can even only be done only as su.

If you're saying that some things can only be done using su and some other things can only be done using sudo, you're definitely wrong. Both are ways of getting superuser rights. There is nothing that you can do using su that you can't do using sudo (if sudo is setup properly) and there is nothing you can do with sudo that you can't do with su.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Or how to become sudo w/o being root for that matter su?

Just disconnecting the pc from the internet doesn't magically solve all problems. Or otherwise the Iranian plants would not have been infected by Stuxnet. There are still other ways of infection like removable devices or already existent but non-complete infections. In any case the biggest security risk is the user himself because we are all error-prone human beings. So it makes sense to limit the damage we can cause. Or would you disable all safety measures of machines like e.g. chainsaws just because they might get a little in your way but protect against yourself?

If you still feel like you need this. it's just a matter of toggling the respective option in gdm. But I don't recommend that. Better learn how to achieve exactly the same using su/sudo. Once you worked it out, it's actually going to be much faster and it's a lot safer (not only as in security against exploits but as a guard against yourself).

Do you know what you would cause by typing this, rm -rf $a/$b ? That deletes your whole root if a and b are unset and any arbitary script (not only your own and there are many) you execute could cause this.