Hi,

I have installed Slackware on my system. And there is ofcourse 'root' and another user 'myuser'. I have been using 'myuser' for all the activities which is the suggested approach.

I have made a few changes in 'myuser' account. As in installed the graphics driver, installed the mouse package and a few other stuff. Today, as I was creating asound.conf in /etc/ as 'myuser', I was prompted that I might not have access to write in this folder and whether I wish to try and save anyway. To avoid any discrepancies, I logged out of 'myuser' and logged in as 'root' and did the changes there.

While doing this activity, I noticed that all the changes done in 'myuser' were not visible in the root. I could not increase or decrease the brightness, nor could I start chrome, and even the mouse didn't have horizontal and vertical scrolling enabled and all these settings and driver installations I had done in 'myuser' account.

Now my question is, if a user's changes to drivers and all doesn't affect root or any other user, then what is the approach to installing new software and drivers and making a few settings such that the user and root both can see the changes. Do I install the driver of video and mouse again and make the settings for the root account? The files that I have saved for sound configuration, these will not take effect in 'myuser' as I am doing this activity as 'root'? Does this mean I'll have to install drivers at root as well as the user separately so that both can use it? If this is the case, then I will be wasting double the space for the same thing.

Hi there,

well, this sounds somewhat weird to me. As a basic rule of thumb you could say that every change, every setting, you're allowed to do as a normal user (not root, not using sudo), will only affect this one user. However, looking at the list of what you did (install a video driver, install other software), I'm wondering why you could do this as a normal user in the first place. I don't know Slackware in particular, but usually, a Linux-based system shouldn't let you do that. It should have enforced root privileges for these things, and then the changes to the system should've been effective for all users.

Possibly your 'myuser' account inherited a lot of root's privileges when it was created (which is not a good idea), or that user is a member of the root group (which isn't advisable, either).

No, usually root has to do the basic work of installing a driver or software package, and maybe setting up some default configuration. Then every user can tune that to their own preference, as far as permitted.

Maybe I really miss something important and peculiar about Slackware, but to me, the rights situation on your machine looks suspicious.

[X] Doc CPU

It sounds to me more like confusing "settings" with "drivers".

A users profile/configuration is something that user can crontrol. But that user MUST NOT be able to affect other users as they may have different needs.

A user must NEVER change something that belongs to root. That would be a security violation.

I did all the mentioned installations when I was under 'myuser' but ofcourse I couldn't without root. So I had to 'su -' to the root and then do all this. Now at the root, I don't see all these.

Everything is there. Just have to look for it in the right place!