[techtalk] Gnome question

[BobTFish]

At 13:41 15/10/00, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 07:46:44AM -0400 or thereabouts, Barbara McMillin 
>wrote:
> > Oftentimes I find myself in Gnome as guest and I want to change to root.
> > How is this done on Gnome desktop? Barbara
>
>     o open a terminal (xterm or gnome-terminal). Type 'su -' in it
>     and give the root password. The rest of your gnome desktop is
>     still guest's. But in that one terminal, you are root, and can
>     do root things.
>
>Unfortunately, you will have to do them at the command line, because
>there is currently no way to get a second little panel which has the
>programs which only root can use.

A good trick for if you want to run graphical applications as root, but 
from a normal user's session is to use ssh.
As in you install sshd on your machine, make keys and everything then open 
a terminal window as normal and type:
         ssh root at localhost
This will then prompt your for the root password which you supply and 
voila, you have a root terminal.
Now, this sounds exactly the same as su, and it behaves as such, except for 
the fact that you can run X applications and have them display on your 
screen :)

Another trick to try if you want a *full* X desktop as root that you can 
switch into is to run vnc (www.research.att.co.uk).. This is another story 
though.

BtF