Hi. Newbie? - maybe, but I have had other flavors of Linux in the past, and this is the first bird to give me so many headaches. I threatened to pluck all of it's feathers out if it didn't co-operate.

My problem is that I cannot access/mount the CDROM due to security settings. I probably had this problem with Suse 9.3, but it didn't matter because all of the driver packages I would ever need was installed during the two+ hour setup.

I have scoured the forums, used tricks and tips, but guess I am just too stupid to figure out the SU command.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you are wanting the cd to automount with KDE I believe first you have to add yourself to the plugdev and cdrom groups. Then if you right click on your desktop and go to configure desktop you can set it up so that an icon appears on your desktop when removable media is automounted.

In short,
followed by (root's) password makes your shell become root shell, but your environment remain as it is (i.e. you won't get the $PATH environment variable of root's, but your own).
Does the same thing as above, but now the environment should become that of root's. Sometimes this matters, so know the difference
Become 'otheruser' instead of root.
Also see
for a few more options.

Then if you set up sudo (add people to the sudo group and modify sudoers file to grant privileges as you see fit), you can use
to run 'somecommand' with root privileges; this way you are asked your own password (not root's like with 'su'), and if you are allowed to run 'somecommand' with sudo, it will be run with higher privileges. Note that this way you don't need to type in root password, you can restrict the things run with root privileges (as long as you do it carefully; for example letting people run a shell or su with sudo makes this meaningless and dangerous) and maybe even ease up making some scripts..well, it depends on what you do and how. Just remember that you need to be careful with how you configure sudo..

Hope it explains things a bit.