Greetings everyone,

I am running Suse 9.1 personal and I need to login as root. How does a person do that?? A friend who is running Linux suggested I open terminal and type in sux, when I do that, it asks me for a password, but will not allow me to enter it which sort of strikes me as a contradiction of terms

If you can't tell by my post, I'm a Linux Newb, so be kind!

Monica

The password doesn't show up, not even as stars. Do 'su' and then type the password and hit enter. The $ sign to the left of the window (as in username@boxname$) will change to a # sign, signifying that you are now root.

Thanks for your help XavierP

Here's what I did, I opened terminal,
Enter > Me@linux:~> su
Response> Password: *when entering password, typing doesn't show
Response> linux:/home/me #

1. I don't have a dollar sign at all
2. I assume the pound sign says I'm logged in as Root?? However, I'm still locked out of the root directory. I'm trying to
add two external USB drives to FSTAB and it says I'm not root and it wil not allow me to make changes.

Monica >

SU (super user) is not exactly the same as root. What I do, being relatively dense about things, is go to start, switch user, then log in as root, starting a new session. There might be better ways, and this might be really bad, but it is what I do. I can then browse the file system in Konquerer instead of the command line.

When your system boots up and the login manager (kdm) comes up you can always login as root, using the password that you set during installation... this way you will have root privileges from the get go and won't have to mess around having 2 sessions open. When done messing around (well... messing around as root should never be done but I assume you know what I mean) as root, simply logout and select "login as a different user" and begin a new session as a regular user.

Try this:

I don't know if I can support this tip! Working as root in KDE is considered to be very unsafe and absolutely not necessary. However, using the term 'messing around' was well chosen. You can mess-up the whole system if you don't know exactly what you are doing. Please, use the above mentinoned possibilities to work as root in a user environment.

Use 'su' to switch to another user on the shell, use 'kdesu' to work with kde applications that need root permissions.

monica976: instead of boxname$ your computers name should appear. This is absolutely correct! What do you mean by 'locked out' from the root directory? Couldn't you change to /root by typing cd /root ?

First, I would like to thank everyone for their kind help

For abisko00: When I open Konqueror, click on the root folder option; the root folder itself has a yellow padlock on the folder. This is what I mean buy being locked out of the folder. When I click on the folder, the message comes back "you do not have access rigts to this location". I believe I have all of the permissions set correctly. OR am I missing something

Monica

Monica976, when you get root access in a terminal you only get access in that terminal and nowhere else. What you want is to log into the graphical desktop as root.

Like everyone else I must warn you about doing anything as root. As root you have the ability to really mess stuff up. That warning aside, here's how you do it

First you'll want to log off. At the login screen type 'root' as a login (without ') and use your root password. When it logs in the desktop wallpaper will likely be different. When I had Mandrake installed it went from it's default blue to a bright red. As soon as you are done with what you needed root access for log off and back onto your normal user account.

One other suggestion I would make to a new linux user is to learn how do navigate and do things by terminal. A lot of things dealing with linux are easier that way and many people will give you advice on how to do things through the terminal.

Have fun with SuSE. It's the most newbie friendly linux distro I've found yet. That's why I'm running it.

Yes, you are missing something very important:

in Linux (in general), a user has very restricted rights. This is good the way it is, since an unexperienced administrator (root) can mess up the whole system, because he is allowed to do everything.

Sometimes, it is necessary to gain root permissions for a short time. I guess this applies to your case. Instead of setting the whole system into root mode, which makes it vulnerable, you can set root permissions to only a limited part of the system.

In your case, as you would like to gain access to the /root directory, the best way (in my opinion) would be to use a konqueror-window with root-permissions:

click on the KDE menu, select 'System' -> 'File Manager' -> 'File Manager - Super User Mode'

then, a window will pop-up and ask for the root password. After typing this, a konqueror window opens that should be in the /root folder already, with full access rights for the whole system.

The same could be achieved by typing 'kdesu konqueror' into a X-console.

Hope this helped.