Partition Tool and Administrative Priveleges
 

Hi there,
Yesterday I installed L.Mint 17 on my Thinkpad T60. First time.
Everything went OK, and I decided to try partitioning my HDD.
I installed KDE Partition Manager and started it.
But what happens?
I got the warning that I don't have the administrative priveleges, so I cannot do the Partitioning! After all I had just installed Linux and was still the SuperUser!

Today I tried the same.
I get a window with the heading Sorry - KDE su , and telling this:
Cannot execute command ''/usr/bin/partitionmanager-bin -dontsu", and thereafter the same warning about priveleges.
I thought that as SuperUser I'm allowed to do anything. Who else should give me the appropriate privelege? Any explanation out there?

You can of course not "partition" anything on a disk in use.

The default way is : Use a live cd with GParted
. http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dis...h=all&year=all
. http://gparted.org/

I would say "You cannot RE-partition anything on a disk in use," which still has a caveat.

If you make a partition 50G and have 100G left over,.. you can be using the 50G as your system drive when you decide to partition your remaining 100G. Happens all the time.

Caveat: PG/VG stuff makes it way easier to add additional space to volume groups, or to decrease the size of a group or basically perform on the fly disk operations.

If you installed the version of Mint with the KDE desktop environment, when you get to its partition manager from the menu or from a terminal you should be prompted for the primary user password if you are using a standard Mint install. You should not log on as super user or administrator unless you have some administrative task to perform. Just logging in as a user doesn't give you administrative privileges. That's a pretty weird message, never seen it before.

[QUOTE=knudfl;5268845]You can of course not "partition" anything on a disk in use.

Thanks Knud.
I was quite sure it WAS possible, at least this is how I understand my Windows 7 Help (on another laptop).
But technically it may not be correct. perhaps it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on...
I have noticed the better way from your description.
Bjørn

I agree. But in the Windows environment (which I am used to, and preparing to leave) I'm so tired of all the barriers when I don't have adm. rights that usually I log on as Adm.
How do I do installations and other tasks as a user in Linux Mint? Need to switch user, or is it just a password away?
Bjørn

Thanks for your answer.
I am used to split my physical disk in at least 2 logical ones, C and D in the Microsoft world. 30 years ago, a colleague of mine told me this reduces the flexibility and was completely unnecessary. I did not agree, because of the lack of good backup utilities in Windows and the incredibly underdeveloped batch command solution. The Linux world is completely new to me, and I wonder if it would be better to have one big disk. The file organization itself and the great possibilities in the command scripts make partition really unnecessary or what?
Bjørn

Weeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll...

If we are on a laptop, one big disk is "fine."

Even if we are on a stand-alone dev server or VM, one big disk is "fine."

But carving a server up into partitions offers a few benefits off the top of my head:

• Security
• Security
• Security

Ok. I can't think of anything else.

It's just a password away. A standard installation of Linux Mint will require you to create a user before you can complete the installation. A password is also necessary for this user. When you want to do administrative tasks, you simply open a terminal and prefix whatever command you want with sudo, this will prompt for your primary user password, enter it and off you go. This makes users aware that they are doing administrative work and lessens the possibility of 'accidentally' deleting important files. If you spend much time here at these forums, you will a lot of posts about just that problem.

Generally, installing software and modifying system configuration files are the primary reasons for elevated privileges on home computers. Being logged in as an administrative user gives those privileges to anyone with physical access to the computer. Particularly risky on the internet.