Taking Root/Administrator permissions in Linux Mint (Gnome)

[Thinker]

1. Temporary Administrator Permissions in GUI

Open terminal and type:

gksudo nautilus

Press enter and enter password.

A new window will appear which will have administrative rights. Any administrator operations like copy-paste, changing file permissions, editing system files can be done within this window.



2. Administrator permissions for executing a command in terminal

Just type sudo in front of a command to execute it as administrator.



3. Login as Administrator

At login screen, type

user name: root

password: (root password)

[DrHu]

I thought the root account/user was a disabled account in Ubuntu/Mint (Gnome desktop or in general), as those distributions used the first user created as an almost root equivalent(root type user), part of the admin group..

[altair4]

In addition to what DrHu said about a non existent root account you might also find the following somewhat amusing.
EDIT: I don't think that sentence had the correct syntax. I did not mean to imply that DrHu's statement was amusing - there is no root account.

If I were to edit a system file ... say fstab for example ... I would run the following command:

Code: Select all

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

What's been driving me crazy is that when gedit opens 2 tabs are automatically displayed - one with fstab and another with "Untitled Document 1". I don't remember that happening in Gnome2 so I started my search.

One thing I found was an Ubuntu bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/838404

Sean Fitzpatrick (sean-fitzpatrick) wrote on 2011-10-09: #3

I see. So does that make the official GNOME position "editing system files should be done with nano or similar" or "system files? why would a user want to edit a system file?"
Sam_ (and-sam) wrote on 2011-10-09: #4

Yep, from my understanding they don't agree with running graphical apps as root. Bug #805682

And a related Gnome bug report: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654184

Matthias Clasen [developer] 2011-07-08 20:10:17 UTC

You shouldn't run nautilus as root. Whats probably happening here is that not
only is nautilus getting started, but also a session bus for root, and diverse
session services, etc etc.

Comment 2 André Klapper [developer] 2011-07-12 11:50:53 UTC

No bug by design here...

nano

The key word in the Gnome response that I found interesting was the word "probably". Probably? Have all the Gnome2 developers left, retired, or been fired? Anyway "gksu leafpad /etc/fstab" eliminated the irritation since leafpad has no tabs