Root password v. User password

[Member roland]

As a longtime Unix system developer (mainly DRS/NX) I always had the uses and dangers of a Root login or privelege firmly in mind. As a mainframe system developer I never needed privileged access at all. This held true when I bagan with antiX Luddite. When asked for an administrator password the Root password was given and accepted.

However things are now changed and many/several/some admin functions require either one but not the other, and I am never quite sure which, so am frequently wrong in my first choice. I also believe the rules have changed between release 16 and 19. The idea of 2 levels of administrator privilege I can accept (with difficulty) but is there a simple rule to guide me which one to enter in any case?

Trawling the forum for ‘Root password’ and ‘Administrator password’ overwhelmed me with responses.

Thanks in advance and apologies for being a bit slow.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Root and Administrator generally mean the same thing on both UNIX and Linux systems, including antiX. I am not aware of any practical differences, if there are any at all.

There is a root user account. On some systems you login directly to root. You can use one of several programs that “switches” the effective user ID to root when logged into your usual account. The purpose of these commands is to access temporary “elevated” rights without remaining in a “privileged” access [root, administrator, and privileged] all carry essentially the same meaning, except that root is the only one that actually has an account on most systems.

If anyone knows of situations where there are accounts with names other than root, they are certainly possible. The root account is the only account I know of that is universally known as a privileged account.

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Brian Masinick

[Anonymous]

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a simple rule to guide me

When asked for a password to attain elevated privileges, enter your password
(because, nearly always, the underlying auth mechanism employed is “sudo”)

The list of program launches requiring the password of the root user account is quite short.
Followup replies can chime in to report which program launchers do expect root user password.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Ways to become root:

https://www.wikihow.com/Become-Root-in-Linux
https://www.2daygeek.com/how-to-become-a-root-user-super-user-in-linux/
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001639.htm
https://askubuntu.com/questions/608495/what-is-root-and-how-can-i-become-it

The first three references cite either su or sudo as a tool to become root.
The fourth reference also mentions two other lesser known tools, gksu and gksudo,
which are used with graphical applications, usually those with a graphical
popup-window to request your password instead of a terminal window.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member sybok]

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Notice that if you would like to preserve your environment in executing command with elevated privilliges via ‘sudo’ (+ your password):
sudo -E <whatever command>
may come handy.
You may explore the man page of sudo by executing the below command in terminal:
man sudo

BTW: Additional things worth of mentioning:
1) Your user should be present in the ‘sudo’ group, determine e.g. via:
groups $(whoami)
If not present, you may add it as ‘root’ (su + root password and the corresponding command ‘adduser <user> <group = sudo>’).
2) If performing some tasks routinely and you want to avoid typing the password all the time, you may want to modify /etc/sudoers
sudo visudo

[Member roland]

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I think the problem comes from my not being sure when to use SU and when to use SUDO. I have Authentication Mode set to SU in the Password Prompt element within Control Centre, should I change this to SUDO? I believe I changed it to SU after this install of 17.4.1.

[Anonymous]

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> the Password Prompt element within Control Centre

( antixcc calls /usr/bin/gksu-properties which displays that prompt )

Yes, you and anyone reading this, should set it to use sudo mode.
In the forthcoming version of gksu, the “chooser” is absent, and only “sudo mode” is supported.

Also (related):

1) note that the “gksudo” command is an alias, pointing back to gksu

2) the “su-to-root” command is a wrapper script and “su-to-root -X” passes to gksu

3) inspect the antiX default (default, meaning “as shipped”) sudoers policy and understand that, as a security consideration, only select environment variables are preserved.

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