P&R: I was gone putting the baby to sleep halfway through an edit (unloading the reply) and missed the great reconciliation.
Please bear in mind, when you post here you become part of the family. When you seem to be going down a bad path, your family members may get upset. Just telling you "you're wrong" is not showing you respect - to respect you we should tell you why we think you're wrong and so give you a chance to show that how what you want is still best for you. Besides, you may not be aware of all the things your older siblings know about.
I'd have liked my older rels to explain rather than give me a clip round the ear with no warning
I've been watching Debian as it is quite popular in NZ. I'm personally not too impressed ... simply from all the troubles people have with it. OTOH: I can respect what they are trying to do and what they have acheived.
I can hardly talk - my own FC2 is somewhat bloated and waddles occasionaly.
On the previous track - before you can do the things you want, you'll need to restore the root password.
With sudo - you only need the user password. You only type it once, and type sudo -k to stop the session. Working to limit which things you do with sudo, requires you to carefully edit thr sudoers file. It is not trivial and care is needed. Read the examples carefully.
If you're going to run sudo nopassword (well: anyone capable of logging into your user account already knows your password right?) - make sure you log out after each session and make sure your firewall is really bulletproof for surfing.
Peace Love and Mungbeans Forever
