Linux Mint Forums

Hi,

New to this, so this may be a silly question: Once I've used the system a couple of times, I don't get asked for a password when using any admin programs such as synaptic. Also in terminal using "sudo, Is it supposed to do this?

Only password saved in keychain is for wireless.

Your default user is basically "allowed to run things as root", you just need to use sudo in front of the command you want to run.

You don't really need to "become root", but if you want to, you can use your power to "run things as root" to give root a password :

sudo passwd root

From there you can become root:

su -

Or even without knowing the root password:

sudo su -

Clem
PS: This is a great innovation inherited from Ubuntu.

Appreciate your answer, Clem, and I'm getting to understand the uses of sudo and su -. What I wondered about is whether functions that require root privileges should ask for my user (not root) password every time they start. Or just once per session?

Excellent system, by the way. Enjoying learning it.

Angel

euthypro wrote:What I wondered about is whether functions that require root privileges should ask for my user (not root) password every time they start. Or just once per session?

The password is cached for a couple of minutes. So if you start two processes via "sudo" that would require authentication in short succession chances are that the password is still cached from the first process, so all following processes won't bother asking as they can still see the successful authentication from the previous process.

Thanks, scorp. I've been playing around in here, adding and taking out things, and I wondered why it would only ask sometimes. So far haven't broken anything.

A.