Possible to make a second root account?
 

Is it possible to make a second root account? Or erase the original root accout and create a new one?

Or "reset" root back to the system's default settings?

Yes, it IS possible, but you don't want to do that.

What do you mean by
?


Cheers,
Tink

Well i don't know if you remember helping me with my problem earlier today where I was getting a "signal 11" carsh every time I tried to log root into Kde, windowmaker, or gnome:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=233017

But what i have found is that accounts other than root have not been affected by the issue and I can log in to these window manager w/o any issue.

What I would like to do is make a second root account... transfer all my important files to the new acct and destroy the old acct since the issue is only affecting that user acct.

Bump... well tinkster don't leave me hanging!

Per the LQ Rules, please do not bump your own thread until at least 24 hours have elapsed without a reply. Because the LQ membership is global, people in other time zones may not have seen this post yet, and thus it may take some time before a response is received.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

And you've been around for long enough to REALLY
know that.


That aside - if it's a matter of corrupted set-up files -
just delete the respective DOT files ...
/root/.kde
and what have you ...

And now that that's said, you shouldn't be running
any graphical environment as root in the first place!!



Cheers,
Tink

Sorry Tinkster I never read the rules... I'll try that when I get home. Thanks for the help!

You really shouldn't be logging in as root in XWindows, as it's somewhat dangerous security-wise. Instead open up a terminal ans su when you need to attain superuser priviliges.

Remember, in Unix and Linux, a user's name is merely a convenience -- the system keeps track of the user's numeric id (uid -- third field of /etc/passwd). UID 0 is special, any user with that numeric ID has superuser priviliges. So using that knowledge, you can create a new superuser account. That can be useful in some situations, but Tink's right, it's not the correct solution to the problem you're having.

Yes I know but right now my root acct is "broken" in the gui... So my objective is really not to log in as root but to fix my root account's gui. I'm well aware of the dangers of loggging in as root, but I think it's even more dangerous to have a root account not behaving correctly. Call me a perfectionist or what :)

I'm wondering what else broke now after my system hard froze... What happened was I was logged in as root setting up vmware workstation when XP caused the scsi subsystemson my my box to cause a kernel panic. The whole system froze up (ot just XP's VM instance) I could not remotely log in and shutdown like I usually do to fix such an issue so I was forced to use the reset button and do a hard shutdown. When my system came back up I was unable to log in as root in GNOME, KDE or windowmaker. Other gui's such as blackbox would work however. But the difference I have found is that these other window managers have no way to use any KDE resource such as Konquorer and so they are acting fine. So it seem that if I can find what's corupted with KDE and fix it everything else will fall in to place.

Well, the thing to do, if I were in your shoes, is to figure out what broke, rather than creating a new account. One first step might be to back up all of root's X and desktop data files and start from scratch (they should be recreated automatically). In any case, advice on that should probably go into the other thread...