As of now, I run everything as root. Im not really intrested in security issues, but is there any other benefit to using regular users instead of root all the time?

And is root user and reg. user the differnce between the root and home directory? Right now I install everything under root and it's getting sloppy.

As you can tell im confused cause i dont think im making much sense.

thanks if you can help.

it's not just security, but running as a regular user protects you from accidentally trashing your system with a rm command. just save yourself some possible trouble by running as a regular user.
to add a user, you could run the adduser command. or if you use kde, you can use the KUser program.

Very true. The first time I tried using Linux I thought the same thing (that there's no point in using two users if it's your own computer and "security isn't a problem"). The fact is, a normal user can do most things (except for system configuration, installing programs, etc.), and it pays off in the long run to do most normal tasks as someone other than root. Especially if you use the command line and get into the habit of using "rm -rf" to remove folders, it is extremely easy to miss a key and delete everything on your system in one stroke. Even if you do everything in KDE or Gnome, using a normal user instead of root still protects you from accidentally messing things up.

Cool thanks, and thats a good point. To tell you the truth when i very first started Linux, I read someone's signature that had something like "if all else fails type rm -rf *" (i forget the actual command) and it deleted every file off my computer. So i guess it would be a good idea to start using normal users.

But initally my question was how to make users. Im using slackware 9.1 with fluxbox 0.9.9 (development version). Do I make them before I startx or can I do it while im running inside fluxbox?

you can run adduser anytime.
about the signature "if all else fails type rm -rf /" i've seen that, too. but the one i saw immediately warns that it is only a signature and that one shouldn't do it if one doesn't know what it does.

Making the new user(s) was easy, but now i have a quick question. Do I have to reinstall everything under that user account like firefox, winex, and aterm etc? Cause none of it seems to work under that account.

can you be more specific? say, what happens when you run the command firefox? but my guess is that you installed firefox in a directory that's not included in the PATH variable of the user you're running. so, try this:

Or let us know what "echo $PATH" gives you as that user. Generally though, no--you shouldn't have to reinstall programs for each user except for a few programs (OpenOffice.org, for example).