[wellylug] UBUNTU 5.10 Dapper. First experiences!

[Grant McLean]

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 22:44 -0500, robcollins55 at aim.com wrote:
> When I  forced  a working "log in as root" setup on K(U)buntu, the
> only login that I could then do anything administrative-wise with was
> the "root" one.  ie - it basically meant that I could no longer "sudo"
> from any of the other users in KDE which was totally frustrating.

As I understand it, the standard way to allow a user to use sudo on
Ubuntu is to add that user to the 'admin' group.  For example with this
command (which needs root obviously):

  adduser rob admin

That relies on the presence of this line in /etc/sudoers:

%admin  ALL=(ALL) ALL

If some thing has caused that line to be lost then putting it back in
(as root) should be all you need.

>   In my experience, the whole force-root-acess-on-ubuntu thing just
> undid a lot of work the ubuntu team put in to get sudo working well. 

It's not so much that the Ubuntu team made sudo work, it already worked
with little effort.  What they did was wire it into the necessary places
in menus and dialogs so that sudo was actually used to invoke commands
that required root priviliges.  If I want to install packages I just
select Synaptic from the menu and gksu prompts me for my password if
necessary.  Maybe this is more complicated in KDE.

>  Personally I would love to have root login access to KDE for the
> purpose of installing new software 

Running the whole of X and a desktop environment and arbitrary X
utilities as root is just taking unnecessary risks.  I'm not saying
those programs are insecure, merely that it only takes one buffer
overflow vulnerability and your system security could be compromised.
Using sudo to limit root privileges to just the processes that need it,
significantly reduces the risk.  

Using sudo you can have a normal login to your desktop environment and
inside it run one or two GUI apps as root.  I have personally found this
setup to be much more convenient than a full root login.

> Automatix2 - this installer may be the only hope for relatively
> inexperienced users such as myself for installing difficult-to-install
> stuff such as java and flash for firefox and swiftfox plus plugins!

The big gotcha with installing packages is knowing to enable the
'Universe' repositories - a simple matter of checking a box in Synaptic.
That's all I needed to do to install the flash package.

Installing Java has always been painful but that's been due to licensing
restrictions rather than technical restrictions.  The recent GPL
announcements from Sun give us hope that things will be easier soon.

Cheers
Grant