How do you give a user root access?

[SuReKiLL]

OK. Well, I finally got around to installing Linux (SuSe 8.1) again, and it is working great. It dual boots with WinXP perfectly, and I did the thing where you mount the windows partition to get access to it from the linux partition. Anyways, to edit certain files and do other things, they require a higher permissions setting. I only have one account on my box, and i gave it access to everything, but it doesnt have write permissions for a lot of things. any ideas how to give my account totally access?

[Dolda2000]

The entire idea with a normal user account is to not have complete access to everything. If that's what you want, you can just as well log in as root directly. There are several reasons not to do that, though, among others that normal user software usually isn't as secure as what is normally requried by root access, meaning that if someone hacks into a user utility, like gaim, over the internet when you're logged in as root, they can trash your entire system.

[l_Kriss]

in /etc/passwd, set the uid and gid to 0. should look something like this:

user:x:0:0::/home/user:/bin/bash

but listen to dolda, running root is not an good idea. switch from normal user to root with

su -

if you need rootprivilegies some times

[genlee]

I would just use sudo if you need to do anything with root.

[SuReKiLL]

Thanks for the help. Just another quick question. As I stated earlier, I did the thing where you can access files on the ntfs partition. Now, I want to access my mp3 collection on that partition. When using XMMS and navigating to the folder on the ntfs where the mp3s are stored, it says that it does not have permission to access those files. Any ideas how to let XMMS access the mp3s?

[Dolda2000]

Mount the NTFS partition with the mount option "umask=222".

[SuReKiLL]

thanks for all the help. everything is working fine now.