[Nottingham] Re: lost kde after changing display settings

[Michael Leuty]

On Sunday 26 June 2005 08:58, Sarah Swindell wrote:
> I thought that you weren't meant to
> connect to the internet as Root

You shouldn't be logged in to your GUI as root. Open up a terminal, then 
type
su -
followed by the root password. Then only processes launched by you in 
that terminal will have root power.

If you want to be even more cautious, don't type "su -" but remain a 
normal user and preface each command by the word "sudo", e.g.
sudo apt-get update
You will again be asked for a password, this time it is your user 
password not the root password.

There is a file somewhere which defines which users are "sudoers" who 
are allowed to do this, but most distros will make the first user that 
was set-up a sudoer by default.

Ubuntu, another Debian-based distro, arranges things so that you can't 
log in as root in the default set-up and have to use sudo.

-- 
Michael Leuty (distro-flirt, currently using Ubuntu)
Nottingham, UK