Well, no and yes
You can perfectly use su and then use urpmi to install, i just thought you had sudo already setup maybe.
The standard way in all linux distributions (besides most *buntu derivatives) is to use su to change to another user account, mostly root.
BTW: you should
always use
- Code: Select all
su -
when you want to use su, because that initializes additionally some environment variables
(like PATH and some others) and if you forget this, many graphical programs like editors or file managers can't be run as root, a common problem.
The other way is to use sudo, so you don't need to switch to the root user account, but just supply your user password. Actually this setup
IMHO is really crap and dilutes on one of the core *nix priciples, the strict separation of root and user accounts everywhere.
It makes the system more usable for normal desktop usage cases, and if there's only one user, but in general this is no good solution.
The normal way to use sudo is to just set it up for single commands, like the ability to mount a network share as user or something the like.
Actually sudo is rather easy to setup, install the sudo package and run the visudo editor (a version of vi by default).
You can have a look there for some examples. I'm also using sudo and i kinda like it, but i won't go into
details of my setup because i think this is a great security risk and commonly disregarded but it works for me,
because i need to use it often and i'm the only user for this machine, so no real need to lock it down.
You may want to have a look at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudoor
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sudoers or
http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/sudo/
