I'm quite new to Linux and will no doubt be posting a lot of stuff over the coming months so I thought I'd start in General just to say Hi!

For a newbie I've managed to do some pretty fun and rewarding stuff today, including setup my Motorola SB4200 to use the USB port - which I've heard is a pain - so I have a good grasp of "stumbling across answers", but just now there's 2 items bugging me, one of which I guess I can ask here as it's probably simple, the other problem (GRUB-related ) I'll post appropriately.

Right, I'm using Fedora Core 2 which I installed and it only asked me once for any username/password info so I reconned I'd be setup as an administrator, but every action I do requires me inputting my password again, a little keyring thing pops up in the tray and it allows me to "keep auth" and "forget auth" but even when i select to keep it, I get put back to some low-level login again after reboot. Any ideas?

Again, Hi and thanks in advance

To preserve security, users are not set up with root access. Effectively, what you are doing is trying to run programs which will affect your system - add/modify users, install programs, change system files - so the OS recognises that you don't have super user access (root access) and prompts you to enter the root password. This is by design and is not a fault.

The vast majority of things you will need to do day to day will not require root access - email, browsing, writing documents - and so it will not be a problem once you have configured your system. Also, this means that your user account will be able to correctly access programs - some programs, if installed only as root, will not work for the users.