I've been a very happy Mandrake/Mandriva user for the past 10 years. I recently swapped over to Slackware/Salix on a new HP Compaq.
During the install of the Salix/KDE I was informed at a dialog box that users could not make system or hardware changes from the GUI apps. I used the same user ID and password for both the administrator and myself as a user. After a successful installation I try to make many other setups involving the system and hardware from the various GUI apps in the system. When the app asks for the admin ID and password, the apps will not accept it.
My question, how can I access the GUI based apps as an administrator ? I'm not adverse to the command line but I can not configure my machine exclusively through the command line.
Many thanks in advance,

You can typically run any program at root (administrator) by simply opening a terminal, typing "su" to become root, and then typing the name of the program. I just did this with nautilus and the program came up---but with no cues to remind me that I was running in superuser mode--see below

The standard advice, however, is don't do this. For example, with one small slip of the mouse, you can very quickly kill your entire system with the file manager.

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Thanks, I will try the next time I start the machine up. The big problem with this is knowing the names of all the apps I need to run.

One way to figure that out, if nothing else works, is to open up the menu editor and see what program the menu item is calling.

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To open any GUI apps in KDE as root, use kdesu.
For example:
kdesu system-settings
kdesu dolphin

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You're either:
1. Typing the wrong password
2. You're using a keyboard layout that doesn't correspond to the one you used during installation, so you think you're typing the correct password, but you're not.
3. You have a laptop and you have set the numlock key to being on, so you think you're typing the correct password, but you're not.
4. You have a laptop and you had the numlock key on when you set the password, but you don't now, so you think you're typing the correct password, but you're not.

Thanks for everyones help. The admin log on problem was solved. I don't exactly know how, maybe by logging on as root through the terminal registered the root password so that the GUI apps would accept it, I don't know, now back to setting up my new Salix machine. Not there yet but close.