Linux Tyro said the following on 11/05/2011 06:26 AM:
Oh, 'linuxworld' (or 'linuxuser', whatever) is not the root but has privileges of system administration, does it mean that?
NO! Root has uid=0. Other users don't. Other users may belong to a group which permits them, by one means or other, to have administration privileges granted to them. For example: (hypothetical to illustrate the point) There is a group 'lp' There are programs that are used to administer the printer system. These should not be run by ordinary users. So the will have access -rwxr-x--- root lp ..... However if you don't want to give out the root password to the guy who administers the printers, then you can add him to the 'lp' group. This technique was explained over two decades ago in a USENIX paper "Life Without Root". http://www.ussrback.com/docs/papers/unix/noroot.ps This approach is suited to larger systems where there will be delegation. It is too complex to implement for all possible forms of delegation in most sites! However it does illustrated well the point of group permissions. Now the example David gave is 'the-same-but-different'. The 'wheel' group is a historic tradition http://www.google.com?=linux+wheel+group that allows, via other methods, a group of users to be granted the ability to 'su' to root without the need for the root password. There are a number of mechanisms for this. The historic one was in 'sudo'. Later, PAM allowed for specific commands. Originally the mechanism prompted the user for his own password rather than the root password. (If you use the same password for both then this is a moot point.) If you googled, you would find specific instructions http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/wheel-group-and-fedora-re... and explanations http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=linux:admin http://foldoc.org/wheel+bit Of course you could have RTFM http://linux.die.net/man/8/pam_wheel Of course you could have found out all this by googling or by reading one of the books or e-books we've referred you to.
But even when I go to yast (GUI), I need to enter the root's password (which I changed after installation, since in the beginning it was the same as that of 'linuxworld' user) and it does only ROOT password not the linuxworld password, even though while installation, it declared the created user as having the system admin privileges.
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