I'm not new to Linux, but I've just been a user up to this point (taking advantage of it's strengths without getting into a lot of the 'nitty gritty').

I'm looking for a good, concise, comprehensive description of the different types of users (root, users, bin, nogroup, public, etc). Some of them are fairly obvious, or at least I assume so (I assume that the "game" group allows people to access the games, etc). I have been frustrated with having switch to root to do some things lately, but don't know what group I should switch my user account to (most people seem to agree that you shouldn't run X as root).

If someone can point to a good webpage, or alternatively post something in here, that would be great!

ok, put "wheel" in your group then you can use "su", this allows u to run stuff as root.

to acess su open konsole and type it, then you can execute stuff as root.

What stuff do you want to run as a user? Are they admin sorta things? If so It's probably going to have to be root/su.

You shouldn't normally have to add yourself to wheel to use "su", just use it to temporarily become root when you're making administrative changes, and then return to being your normal user. If even that is too annoying, look into "sudo".

As far as all the "types" of users you're talking about, those are most likely just groups on the system, and what they allow you to do depends on what is assigned to those groups. If you type "ls -l" in a directory, you can see the owner and group of each file. Depending on the permissions, those in the group assigned to the file can usually do more than those not in the group.

It's probably better to just leave your normal user in the users group, and use "su" or "sudo" when you need to temporarily have administrator permissions for something. If you give more access to your user, you risk accidentally deleting system files or giving a rogue program access to your entire system.

I have been having trouble (as have many, apparently) getting my fstab modified to the point where I can mount a samba fileserver as a user. Thus far, I have had to mount it as root, which will allow me to read the files on it, but any uploads that I have to do, I must do from terminal, also as root. I would much rather not have to go to the extra trouble each time, so I would like to figure out what permissions I need to have to write as my own user.

hmm, try putting "users" in your fstab for that mount.

Yeah, I've tried that. I don't know if it's a Suse specific problem, but a lot of people seem to be having problems with samba mounts from fstab, at least in the Suse forums.

Here's what I have in fstab:

//10.5.4.50/sparky /home/sparky/Remote/Mac smbfs noauto,users,credentials=/home/sparky/.macpwd 0 0

It keeps telling me that smbmnt must be installed setuid root for direct user mounts