[Klug-general] Baffled by Kubuntu

[Mike Rentell]

G'day all,

After many years using Mandrake/Mandriva I am now disappointed to find 
that the 2008 version (both 32-bit and 64-bit) is unstable on my 
reasonably well-spec'd AMD64 system. Ever more frequent freezing has 
caused me to look elsewhere for a Linux system.

I'm sold on KDE so I downloaded a CD for kubuntu (64-bit) yesterday and 
installed it today, overwriting / but keeping /home.

All seemed to go OK and it has been running for hours now and is rock 
stable - so that's a relief.

But the ubuntu way of getting root privileges has baffled me. I know 
there is a sudo command but I can't seem to figure it out.

I've installed virtualbox and that works but of course I must install 
user mick into group vbox. How do I do that? There does not appear to be 
any graphicy facility available.

Oh did I say that it is KDE 4.0? Now there's a steep learning curve.

I've found System Settings/Advanced/ Login Manager but its Users tab is 
completely greyed out. The KDE 4.0 help file says that this page should 
display a Administrator Mode button but it don't.

All I want to do is make a user/group change with a gui because I am too 
dim to do it with a console.

Can someone please advise me, in words that a non-specialist would 
understand, what I'm doing wrong. It seemed so easy on Mandriva - pity 
it has become so unstable.

All kind offerings gratefully received.

MikeR
in Folkestone