On 04/08/07 18:56, Andrew Jenkins wrote: > I've been a Mandrake/Mandriva user since I ditched > the dreaded MS four or five years ago. I just > thought I'd try Ubuntu (7.04) alongside my Mandriva > 2005 on my laptop.
Hi Andrew, welcome to the Ubuntu community :) > I'm used to the Mandriva way (as with most other > distros) of having a 'root' account and then all the > other 'user' accounts. The Ubuntu method of asking > for your 'user' password to then allow you to go off > and create system-wide mayhem is really not suitable > when you have curious kids. Again, typing 'sudo' and > being asked for your 'user' password doesn't strike > me as very secure. I'm not sure I understand your problem. sudo is very secure if you use it properly and it makes it easier to manage privileges among your users (revoking a root password from a user's brain is more difficult than removing them from the admin group). All you need to do to stop your kids causing mayhem is remove their user accounts from the admin group. Of course, if you're allowing them to use your password and user account (which you seem to be implying) then that's your security problem, not sudo. > Is it easy to make Ubuntu behave in a similar fashion > to Mandriva and if so how? If you really must enable your root account, you can do 'sudo passwd root' to give root a password. sudo will still work though so you'll have to take your user out of the admin group or use visudo to disallow the admin group from using sudo. Note that graphical programs invoked using gksudo to get root permissions will no longer work and you'll probably have to run them from a root terminal instead. In summary, you can enable the root account but it's a lot less trouble to use sudo wisely, IMHO. -- Andy Price -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
