promoting or creating an administrator account

[RetForLife]

Hello, this is my first time posting so be gentle

The school I have been working at this year is looking to ditch Windows and go fully Linux/open source. So far, we have one old laptop with two partitions, set with Windows XP on the first partition, the second partition has SuSE 10 sp1 on it. The other on-site I.T person and myself are quite new to Linux, having previously only been Windows users.

We've been tinkering around with it, and so far we've been able to access the Internet through the school's Windows network and proxy, but we seem to be having difficulty properly registering against the domain and installing applications.

We downloaded the Linux version of Skype, but upon trying to install it, were given a repository error. We are unsure if this is due to trying to install it on a user account, or something a bit deeper. Either way, we don't have an administrative account, other than root (and being online, and having read a few threads here, I don't feel hugely comfortable being online with the root account, even through the firewall box and the proxy etc).

I'm currently not on-site, and today was the last day of school for two weeks, so I'm unable to provide the exact error message encountered when trying to install Skype. May be able to update this thread in around a week when I install the replacement switches (two switches blew recently, we suspect bad power).

We registered against the Windows domain (few Win2003 servers, with a Win2000 box in there as well) but lost all desktop icons, the Linux client has appeared in the Windows domain DHCP and AD.

How would one go about promoting the user account we have been using to familiarise ourselves with Linux, to a system administrator account (if that is indeed why we failed to install Skype), also, any advice about where the desktop icons have gone when we logged in to the domain successfully? Is that a normal thing upon first logging into a Windows domain with a Linux client?

Any help or insight to this would be greatly appreciated.

[Manchunian]

Hello, and welcome to Linux!

Phew! (big breath!) don't know where to start on this! I think we need to take things step by step, as there appear to be several problems to deal with here, and I may not be able to help with all.
First off, what exacly do you imagine is an adminstrative account that is not root? I'm a bit confused about this. I think you haven't grasped one of the fundamental differences between Linux and Windows on this front. Linux does not need an administrative account, like most people should have in Windows. Any account can temporarily gain admin priviledges, but only after requesting them and providing the correct password. For example, on my computer I have a session for myself, and one for my children, but on neither can I alter in any way anything in the system. For this I need to open a command line, give my root password, and do all admin tasks via the command line. The only thing that could correspond to an adminstrative account would be to log in as root, and this would be a very dangerous thing to do, and is usually disabled by default.

[Jonathan183]

SUSE will allow you to login as root ... but you should only do this when you really need to as Manchunian has already said.
The majority of software installation you should do using YAST, and you should install software from the repositories.

Login as a normal user, if you need root access for things like Yast you will be prompted for the root password. If you have only setup a root user account then the first thing to do is setup a normal user account ... you can do this in Yast.

[alkemist]

I concur with the first two...only use root when absolutely necessary (which is never at all.)

Make sure you are downloading from the right repositories as well, cause downloading from a Linux 10.1, 10.2 or 10.3 repository may cause conflict on Linux 10.0

[Manchunian]

SUSE will allow you to login as root ... but you should only do this when you really need to

I know it does - but, and here we go into an area which is highly controversial, I'm one of those who says that you should never, ever log in as root. If you want to do an administrative task, then you should do so in your normal session using the command line. To log in as root runs the risk of a)making mistakes (obviously) b)passing on parametres to the system that can break something (as you're running x). A root session in Linux can do much, much more dammage than an administrative session in Windows.

[ironduke]

RetForLife,
if you are one of two IT people looking after this school's computers and they want to go linux it's probably time to do a proper course of some kind. You'll be glad you did.

[RetForLife]

Thanks for the advice everyone, I believe we have some proper Linux training coming up. I'll have a look at YaST when I'm next on site, that may have been the problem, we were trying to run the file itself, like in Windows. I'll make sure to mention to the other tech what you've all been saying about the dangers of the root user, just in case he gets impatient and tries something

I'll also make sure to check that the repository and our SuSE version are the same, to avoid using the wrong repository.

Looks like learning Linux will take a bit of time, but I'm sure it'll be a fun challenge. I'm gonna set up a network at home to do my learning with so I can take the answers on site.

Once again thanks for all the help, I'll be sure to check back with you more knowledgable ones next time I'm left scratching my head.

[Jonathan183]

Two common problems for new users are login as root and trying to install software without using the package manager for the distro they are using. Now you know how about the issue and can let others using your system know you will avoid quite a few potential problems.

Provided you have your user data backed up there is no reason why you can't experiment with a system before you complete the training course. You may find that once you have done the course you will find there are things which you want to change, which may mean a fresh install, so just use one or two PCs initially to save you re-installing on every PC to get things working the way you want.

Good luck, it sounds like you are on the right track. For home use you may want to try openSUSE 10.3 which you can download free, its the version I use.

[RetForLife]

Ok thanks for the help everyone, looks like I'll be both restricting my usage of root and telling my fellow tech not to go there either .