So i wanted to amke another account that would be just like root

So i made the user and made its GID="root" and its GROUPS="root"

I made its home = "/root"

I made its shell "/bin/bash"

now when i try to LS in my home i get permission denied...

In X i have no admin privledges and always have to sudo

WTF?!?!

please help

I think you have to set its UID=0 too (making that account just an alias for root), but it may bring you some trouble around.

You could also either give more permissions to the "root" group (like +xw on several files) and use it to give some admins privileges for some users, or create a group just for this.

Anyway, it sounds like a dangerous thing to do, specially since the root thing is one of the most criticized things of Unix because is too powerful, why would you like to have 2 of such god-like monsters!

id rather be admin all the time but not be logged in as root

and u cannot have two users with the sane UID

scrupul0us,

When switching to *nix operating systems you really need to drop the Windows mentality where you're always administrator by default. Search the board for "linux and viruses" and you will discover long, long threads covering the multitude of reasons.

Here I will list a few of the more basic reasons (the polite method):

1. If you accidentally type the wrong command with root privvies (like rm -rf [foo] , you can toast your machine and any mounted filesystems

2. more and more *nix apps are refusing to run when they detect root privileges (quite the opposite of many Windows apps) due to the developers' acknowledgement of the security risks

3. If you happen to encounter one of the very few Linux viruses, or one of the many trojan horses, running it as root will pretty much guarantee that you will have to wipe the filesystem and reinstall the OS. Firefox and konqueror may be less prone to exploits, but they are not inpenetrable and if you run as a normal user, such exploits will be confined to $HOME, causing you to have to rename that directory and move documents over as needed, but running it as root, again, makes your entire system and all mounted filesystems vulnerable.

In short (the blunt but 100% truthful method): it's a stupid idea.

However if your computer is not going to be networked (this means not connected to other computers, not connected to the Internet, not connected to a cellular phone, no bluetooth, etc.) at ALL and you know for absolute certain that all of the programs you are going to be running are clean, then sure, aside from reasons #1 (a d'oh moment) and #2 (programs checking for root), running as root all the time will be perfectly okay.

Well, you actually CAN have to users with the same UID (check the man page of useradd, specially the "-o" switch which affects the -u switch which sets the UID), but as I said it will just become another login name for root (well, I called it an "alias", so is not quite what I said, but it was what I wanted to say).

If you do want to have another dangerous admin account, I guess you should go the group way (In that way you can limit that account a little).

I have noticed a lot of these threads lately and I am not sure if its because more people are switching to Linux from Windows. If you are going to create another account with all root privileges, I'd say its a waste of time because its not different from running as root directly. To protect your system from intruders and yourself, its essential that you only use admin privileges only when necessary. There are commands that help you to temporarily get root privileges whilst logged in as a normal user, so take a look at their manual pages. The commands are "su", "sudo" and if you use KDE, you can use "kdesu".

i guess ill just have to visudo my desired name and go from there as needed... i guess why im asking is b/c right now my WWW root (htdocs) is owner=root and group=root and the user i log into samba with is in the root group, but im still not able to write to the dir EVENTHOUGH ive given the user admin privledges for the samba share ::Sighs::

ficed the samba issue

So why not create a group e.g. www, change group ownership of htdocs and all its files to www. Make sure the www group can read and write to htdocs and put any users you want to read and write to htdocs in that group. I am not sure about samba because I have never used it before.

well i fixed the samba issue but just making the htdocs and all subs owner = the name and group=users

now i have full access... now i just need to get php working... but thats in another thread