Here lately, under my account, I haven't been able to do squat!! Browse the web, use gaim, or even write stuff to my mounted WIN98 partition! I went into my root account and gave myself root privelidges. That didn't work. So I removed myself from ALL groups except root. Still nothing, so I made myself part of every group but made root primary. Still nothing. Ideas?

Also, I'm having trouble uderstanding the levels of security in this OS and exactly what "groups" mean what. Help anyone?

how did u give yourself root priviledges?
(i want to know how)..
in my knowledge, it's not possible


on linux.. everything is file..
even devices..

and all files have permissions
owner permission
group permission
world permission

if u do 'ls -l filename'
output format will be like this
[root@beautifulmind apache]# ls -l /home/eugene/ttttt
-rw-r--r-- 1 eugene eugene 1 Jun 23 21:34 ttttt
which means
the file's owner is eugene, owner group is eugene
and the permission for owner/group/world is rw/r/r (read,write/read/read)

you can change owner and group owner like this
[root@beautifulmind apache]# chown eugene.apache /home/eugene/ttttt
[root@beautifulmind apache]# ls -l /home/eugene/ttttt
-rw-r--r-- 1 eugene apache 1 Jun 23 21:34 /home/eugene/ttttt

you can change permission like this
[root@beautifulmind apache]# chmod 761 /home/eugene/ttttt
[root@beautifulmind apache]# ls -l /home/eugene/ttttt
-rwxrw---x 1 eugene apache 1 Jun 23 21:34 /home/eugene/ttttt*
[root@beautifulmind apache]#


7(which is 4(r) + 2(w) + 1(x) ) = read/write/execute
6( 4(r) + 2(w) ) = read/write
1 ( 1(x) ) = excecute

which means
owner can do read/write/excecute
group can do read/write
anyone can do execute

'groups' shows you what group you are in..
[root@beautifulmind apache]# groups
root wheel disk adm sys daemon bin
[root@beautifulmind apache]#

so ..
group concept is for ?
control permissions on files
if you have 5 close friends account 3 not that close friends accounts
you can add the 5 friends in one group A, 3 friends in another group B

for your diary file
set permission 640 on the diary file
and set owner/group as you/group A

read other docs for further info

You can edit the /etc/passwd file and basically make your user root by changing the UID to root's.

Cool

thx MasterC

No problem

it actually depends on your distro as to whether you can give a regular user full root access. slackware doesn't seem to have a problem with it at all, but on a redhat system if you add a user to the root group it will only give them permission to do certain things that root can (can't remember what, exactly). but i couldn't even startup nfs services as my super root user on my redhat box.

anyone else having these problems?

Yeah, actually that's what I ran into, but the eye-candy and user friendliness of RH runs over Slackware...so I'll deal wih it..