I posted this in the Mint forum, but thought I might have more chance of getting more replies in the General forum

Have just installed Mint12 - and it does seem to be a 64bit ripper of an OS !!
And it seems to have some "optimising interaction" with the CPU/mboard etc when it installs, judging by the number of assorted files with "amd64" in their titles - which has to be a good thing compared to the rather "one size fits all" approach of older linuxes.
I tried Ubuntu12.04 - an LTS too - but just couldn't live with the taskbar across the top of the screen that Unity/Gnome3 has - I much prefer the "old" Gnome2 GUI - as do many others, so it seems!

??> But how can I make it allow a GUI login as root from the login screen - which it refuses to do now?
The trick with Fedora14 (which by default also disallows this), which I've migrated from while still keeping it in reserve, was simply to comment out the 3rd line in /etc/pam.d/gdm-password (= auth required pam_succeed...) but neither that file, or anyhing much like it, seems to be anywhere in that directory in Mint12. And yes, I have set a root password, and I know how to "su -"/sudo etc and I'm reasonably OK with commandline stuff, but sometimes (eg running the excellent little bash "bootinfoscript" to sort out booting probs) it's just a whole lot easier to login to a GUI as root.

And please - spare me the sermons about how one should never do this - it's too dangerous etc etc - I know the dangers/potential probs - but I've figured out how to get a booting "spare" copy of it - and other OS partitions - on older whirlygig sdds as my current main "backup system" - which seems to work very well.

There's probably some rootlogin=true line somewhere in Mint12 - but does anybody know where??

TIA uplines
PaulW

AMD FX-4100 Black cpu
Asus M5A97 EVO m/b (SATA3 ripper!)
8GB of Kingston 1600 RAM which, ATM, only seems to want to run at 1333max
Asus Xonar STX s/card - brilliant!
Radeon HD5450 vidcard - it goes - just
Seagate 1TB ST31000524AS (Mint, XP, & ntfs "dump")
90G OCZ Vertex 3 (7 - <15sec boot! & FC14)
Asstd other whirlygigs and SSDs as needed

These instructions are for enabling root login in Debian. They may also work for Mint.

Thanx for that bigrigdriver.
That link looked quite promising, but Mint doesn't seem to have either an etc/gdm3 directory to get a daemon.conf file from or an etc/pam.d/gdm3 file.
I wouldn't expect it to either as, AFAIK, it's not Gnome3 - only, thank goodness, the old, much more user-configurable Gnome2.

/etc/pam.d/mdm (Mate Display Manager??) is a very similar file to the one that that link you gave says to comment out the fifth line of.
But neither it nor any of the others in the pam.d directory has that pam_succeed_if.so.... line to comment out. Which, from memory, is very similar to if not the same as the line that one has to comment out in pam.d/gdm-password in Fedora14 to get to be able to login to a GUI as root in FC14.

Any more suggestions/ideas anybody??

TIA
PaulW

Duh!
>Login Screen Preferences>check:Allow administrator login
Having already set a root password of course.

Was too simple for me - was expecting a more complicated solution like the Fedora one I'd used before.
Will post this here before marking it Solved in case there are some other mental defectives like me

So now that you have enabled your GUI root login may you be so kind to detach that machine from the net, so that our servers are not brute-forced or DDOSed, our email-accounts are not spammed and illegal content will not be hosted from your potentially compromised system?

1 members found this post helpful.

No, in fact if you actually understood the dangers, etc you would not be even asking his question...

In reply to "TobiSGD": I'm very careful to only do a root GUI login/userswitch when I absolutely have to! And, as you say/imply, I spose I should turn off the modem/router when doing this. But how come all those horrors you mention can be done from a root login?? Is there some way of doing it more safely?? Where canI/shouldI read up on these potential dangers?

And to "caravel": yes, I confess I am a bit of an ignoramus/stillabit"newbie"-ish. But I do enjoy fiddling around with the all the various OSs I have installed - with all their various positives&negatives.

Have also just marked the original (more multifaceted) question in the Mint forum, that this one derived from, as SOLVED too.

Thanx uplines
PaulW

Those dangers are mainly caused by two things: the human capability to easily forget things and the human wish for convenience.
See it this way: You are logged in as root to the GUI configuring something and stumble upon a problem where you have to search the solution on the net. The correct way to do this would be to log out from root, plug in your router/modem, log in as normal user, search for the solution, log out from your normal user, disconnect the modem/router, login as root and continue your work.
I can assure you that after doing this three or four times, especially when you are already somewhat upset because you have problems you can't easily solve, you think yourself: forget it, if I use the browser as root only one time nothing will happen.
Or you simply forget that you are currently root and just continue your normal tasks as root.

At this point your system switches to the "potentially compromised" state, since every software that you use that accesses the net can be exploited (including browser-plugins, IRC clients and whatever else) and since you started the software as root the exploited software can do anything on your computer.

This potential threat to your computer is totally unnecessary. There is absolutely no need to ever log into the GUI as root and in fact, if you read my description above, it is more convenient to not do so. I can edit a configuration file as root in a terminal while searching the net for documentation as normal user. Or restart services. Or install/remove software. Or start a file-manager as root if I need to. No need to constantly log out and in again and no potential danger of becoming lazy or forget that I am logged in as root.

There is a contradiction here. You began with
and then asked this
and finished with this confession.
When someone is ignorant about something, the proper course of action is to ask for information, not to falsely declare that one already possesses the knowledge and tell everyone else not to lecture. According to your statistics, you have been using Linux for at least four and a half years. You should know better.

You're quite right about how easy it is to forget the details of how one is logged in! And thanx for the prodding/reminder about this!

But I spose/hope that, when going to a root GUI, turning off the connection to the router in software - ie in the OS/userdesktop - will be as good/safe as turning off the hardware? - viz the modem/router thingie itself at the mains. Am I correct? As there are other family members living here (on the dark side, sadly - though that rich man's OS is, at least, still UNIX!) who use the connection fairly often. Interesting how the router has now become the centre of computer ops in households !

I'm not quite as ignoramus/"newbie"ish as I described myself - ie I wasn't as "opensource" as I could/should have been - the which (ie the friendly, helpful, non-judgemental opensource-ish nature of it) is, IMO, one of the delightful/pleasant aspects of the linux community and, in general, of this excellent LQ site too - ie I'm happy to be politely "corrected" when I "get it wrong"! - which I often do!
I can remember loading shoeboxes full of punched cards of Fortran into computers in the late '60's.
And about 25-30 years ago I spent a year or two writing most of my own "language" for a Z80-based microcomputer with FFh x BFh screen res, as I recall, and with cassette loading/storage of its 26K of RAM - in machinecode (eg: 3A ppqq = Load accumulator from memory) - there wasn't an assembler around for it/them (Z80s) that I could then afford/knewof. Before, 20 years ago, I got my first XTTurbo with, wow!, a 20meg MFM hdd! - type4 in the list of 47(??) that the manual-setup BIOSs had then. With no such things as mice of course, and with DOS 3 on a couple of 5.25" floppies.

Anyway enough boasting - now to try and figure out why this #$%^e ATI vidcard is giving me a BSOD/blackscreen on bootup in Mint after installing its factory driver!

As long as the connection is down you are safe, regardless if you put it down in hardware or software. Of course the safest solution still would be not to log in as root to the GUI at all.

For your ATI issues, if you can't solve that problem just open a new thread with the relevant info and we will try to help you with that issue.

Relevant information would be:
- model of your videocard
- driver version you try to install
- exact steps you have done
- exact description of the errors/malfunction you get
- as always, which distribution you use