How to make my account same as root privileged?
 

How to make my account same as root privileged?
Im using mandriva 2010.0. GNOME Desktop.


Thank You

The only superuser that a GNU/Linux system admits is the root user. You can't give a normal account root privileges. The root user should only be used to do administrative tasks, not for normal operation.

That's actually wrong. It's trivial to give yourself root privileges; but
it's very arguable that it makes sense. In terms of security, and best
practices I wouldn't recommend doing it (ever!). Even if you have a recent
back-up, a slip of the finger w/ elevated powers can cost you several
hours of work ... e.g., a rm -rf /* instead of rm -rf *as your own
user will most likely give you a chance to cancel killing your own files
via Ctrl-c before you caused major damage. With root privileges ...
you're probably going to start to wonder why it's taking too long only
just too long into the process to be able to recover easily.



Cheers,
Tink

I want to have privileged in editing printer setting, software installation in my limited account without asking to use root account.

Thank You Sir, is there anyway how to do it.

The idea is that you can still have super-user powers by using either su or sudo, but you ONLY use them for commands that specifically need them. This is better for safety, as in it prevents you messing stuff up by accident, and for security (i.e. if someone gains access to your account, they can't make a file executable, since they don't have your sudo password)

The "cleanest" way to achieve both those goals is to
a) add yourself to the print admin group as specified by cups.conf
and
b) add an alias to whatever package management/software installation
tool mandriva uses ... if you were e.g., using ubuntu you could
have an alias swinst='sudo /usr/sbin/synaptic' and a line in
/etc/sudoers that allows you to run synaptic passwordless.
%sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL, NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/synaptic


Takes 2 minutes longer to set-up than granting yourself full root,
but it's ultimately more secure.



Cheers,
Tink