Hi guys. Heres hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Im a first time poster with 2 questions that werent quite answered in other threads ive looked at.

Ive recently installed redhat 9. I have a little experience with linux as a user, in that i can poke about within my own directories, change permissions on MY files, basic stuff like that, but ive had ZERO experience as 'root'.

firstly (and less importantly i guess) when im logged in as a user, is there any way i can log in as root in terminal?
every time i just try 'login' and put in root as username and the password, it wont let me.


secondly, and the main question is....
Ive got an ADSL internet account, and i used the 'adsl-setup' command in terminal to get it all sorted out.
during the setup there was a question along the lines of 'do you want to allow users to connect to the net?" to which i answered yes.

as root, the net works fine, adsl-start/stop does what its supposed to and everythings great.
but when im logged in as a user and i try 'adsl-start' it says 'command not found'. infact none of the 'adsl-.......' commands are found.

im assuming theyre tucked away in a place that 'user' doesnt have access too, but clearly root does.


oh, and thirdly, a possibly stupid question, that i suspect i know the answer to anyway.
being that im just using redhat at home, on my pc, just like windows or anything, im the only user, and im not actually administrating anything, would it be a stupid idea just to use the 'root' account all the time?

Thanks in advance!

to get root from a terminal type
su -
then it will ask for roots password

sorry I can't help on the ADSL question, but I'm sure someone will be along with an answer

you could run as root but it's not very wise especially being so new to linux you could find yourself doing alot of fixing or reinstalling the OS, also not very good from a security standpoint.

thanks for the info mike.

i still cant 'legitimatly' log on to the net as 'user', but i can atleast log onto redhat as 'user', then switch to root in terminal, and connect it up through there.

no doubt theres a better way than that, but hey, atleast i can get online now......

and i dont have to actually be online as 'root', which, as i suspected, seems like a not to good idea.

ok can you do 'which adsl-start' from both root and user, and then tell me what does it say?