Subtitles of the Movie

When You Need Administrative Access. Administrative access is associated with the root user. Such access is required to change the configuration that may affect other users. Such administrative access allows you to change hardware settings, install software from locations such as Fedora repositories, and otherwise manage the configuration of the local system. So, if you're the administrator for your Desktop you may need administrative access at least once in a while. To that end, there are three basic ways to take administrative access for the local system. You could just log in as the root administrative user. You could take root privileges from a regular account. Finally you can set up administrative permissions from a regular account. Yes, you can log in as a root user, but such logins are disabled by default for Fedora 11 in the GUI, so if you want to login as root you have to do so from a Text Console. This is a graphical console and here, when I press Ctrl-Alt-F2 I can login from a Text Console. I enter the root user name and I entered the password, that administrative password that I created during the installation process, which you could have changed later, but that's the first time you created that administrative password, and there it is. I've logged in as the root administrative user. I can return to the GUI by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1, and that's where Fedora's a little different from other Linux Distributions. On most other Linux Distributions you return to the GUI by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7. The second way to take administrative access is from a regular account. All you need to do is run su in a Command Line Console. To open a Command Line Console in the GUI press Applications, System Tools, Terminal. I have more than one terminal in here, but they both end up with a similar Command Line Interface so it doesn't really matter which one I use. I run the su command, press Enter, and I'm prompted for the root administrative password and having entered that password I'm now in a Terminal as the root administrative user with the rights and permissions of that account. The third way to go is to set up administrative privileges for a regular user. When you do that, that regular user can use his own password, which can and should be different from the root administrative password to run administrative commands, and that process is governed in the etc/sudoers configuration file. If you're a Linux geek and guru you can make such changes with the visudo command which opens up the etc sudoers file in a text editor known as vi, short for the Visual Editor, but most Desktop users aren't that geeky in Linux so to open etc. sudoers in a graphical Text Editor you have to change the permissions, so I run the chmod command to change the permissions on the etc. sudoers file and I give it write permissions. Now I can use a command like gedit to open the etc. sudoers file in a graphical Text Editor and once I get through these quote-unquote error messages, which don't matter for what I'm doing here, I've opened the et cetera sudoers file in the gedit Text Editor, and near the bottom of this file I see an important line, which gives the root administrative user full permissions to the sudo command, and to give a regular user account the same permissions I start by making a copy of that line and I paste that line, substituting the account of my choice for a root. I save the changes, I close gedit, I've removed write permissions from the file, which is necessary as strange as it sounds. Now to test things out, I exit out of the root administrative account, and to see how it works we try a typical administrative command, fdisk -l, which should list the partitions on connected drives, but it lists nothing because I'm doing it from a regular account, but if I do it with the sudo command in front I'm prompted for my own password. Note the difference here to what you saw earlier when I ran the su command. I enter my own password and I get information for the partitions on the local system. Let's see that comparison again. If I run the su command alone I'm prompted for the root administrative password. If I run the sudo command, and once you enter that the password, under sudo it's good for 15 minutes by default, you're prompted for your own user password. OK, those are the basic methods for gaining Administrative Access.