newbie confusion with su

[ahurd]

I am trying to edit /etc/fstab so that cdrom and floppy drives automount. First I found appropriate edits, then used Krusader to click on /etc/fstab which brought up the file in Kate. Made changes and tried to save. Not allowed since didn't have permissions, I think. Tried su Kate and was asked for password then Kate popped up. Got into Kate and made changes. Still would not allow changes. Closed Kate then tried su Kate again. This time no prompt for password and Kate did not open. Tried su Krusader to see if it was a problem with Kate and again it didnt open, although it had (after prompting for paswd) a little while earlier. Completely closed down then rebooted and tried the above sequence with su Kate again and it atill would not come up, same with Krusader. Could anyone tell a complete beginner what is happening here. Many thanks.

[Snowhog]

Re: newbie confusion with su

Open a Konsole. Type the following:

kdesu kate /etc/fstab

You will be prompted for a password. Enter your password. Kate will open with the /etc/fstab file as the super user (sudo). Make your changes and save. Note: Always make a backup copy of the file you are about to change. If you really screw-the-pooch, you will be able to recover by deleting the bad file and renaming the backup.

In *ubuntu, you don't use sudo to launch a GUI application from a Konsole. You use kdesu instead.

[ahurd]

Re: newbie confusion with su

Many thanks again for your help. FYI the following lines in fstab (found on a Google search) worked for me to automount while avoiding the problems on bootup mentioned by you (I think) and others:

/dev/fd0 /floppy auto user,auto 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 ro,user,auto 0 0

[opie]

Re: newbie confusion with su

To clarify a bit more:

don't confuse su and sudo. Ubuntu/kubuntu lock the root account. If you want to see more about the thinking behind this see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

So, unless you have gone out of your way to enable the root account, which is not suggested, you would use sudo to run command line tools and would give your user password.

As snowhog stated the proper way to run GUI applications is not with sudo, but with kdesu (kde superuser).