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Neil Winchurst wrote: > I have decided to go for kubuntu and all along one of my worries has > been the use of sudo and the fact that it keeps you in root mode for 15 > minutes. Your experience shows that I was right to worry. > It could have happened if I ran su or logged in as root. The thing about it is I couldn't empty the trash folder as a normal user. I was in a hurry (had to go to work) so I just ran sudo rather than alter the permissions on the folder. > The remedy is quite simple, at least in concept. > > When I need to go to root mode (I am using Mandriva at the moment) > in a terminal I simply use su and password. As soon as I have finished > I type in exit and enter and I am back in normal user mode. If I am > in something like 'configure your computer' which asks for the root > password, as soon as I have finished I exit back to the desktop and I > am again back in normal user mode. There is no nonsense about being > left as root for up to 15 minutes. Who came up with that one? > > In a way I prefer the sudo method. When I first started running Linux I was so used to being an administrator (a la Windows) so I used to login as root for everything. At least with sudo if I need to run something as root I can just use sudo. > Anyway, as I say, the remedy is simple. We need a simple command in > (k)ubuntu which switches you back to normal user and cancels the > rootmode. No leaving it as root for 15 minutes. (I wonder who came > up with that one?) Then we users could run this command as soon as we > had finished with the command that needed root. Perhaps we as a user > group should put some pressure on the ubuntu programmers to provide it. > IMHO it would be much safer and not at all difficult to use. > As far as I know you sudo just runs the one command as root, anything else you run is still as a normal user unless you specificially use the sudo command in front of the command you want to run. > I wonder what happens in ubuntu now if the 15 minutes run out while a > command is still running?? > The command still runs with root priviledges. sudo remembers the password. As you'll find on a load of Ubuntu Howto's it specifies the commands with sudo in front. If you was asked to enter a password for EVERY command it would get kind of tedious. If you logged in a su and forgot to exit from su (it can happen!) then that would be a bad thing. I'm now back up and running in Ubuntu Edgy (AMD64 release version). It was a good excuse to clear out some of the chaff from my hard drive. I remember a few years back I had an issue with Mandrake 5 when I first tried it. It installed okay but I couldn't login. I couldn't login as either root or the user I created. What a fat lot of good that was. I promptly went back to Windows 98. Rob Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html