No Root Permission

[soundchaser59]

Ok.....what did I miss? I installed Mint on to my 128GB usb stick. I partitioned a system partition of 8GB, an extended partition of 110GB, and a swap partition with the remaining 5 or 6 GB.

It seemed to install well, I restarted, selected my user name and put in my password. When I go to the file system I can see the 8 GB it's installed on, and it correctly tells me there is 6.5 GB free here. I can see my 160GB Windows hdd, and it correctly says I have 80GB free there. But when I open the "Computer" icon and double click on the usb stick, it says it cannot mount. If I try to drill into the root folder it says I do not have root permissions.

I assume I need to redo the install to acquire the correct permissions... I have a feeling someone tried to warn me about this in another thread....

And is that the best way to partition out the space on my stick? Maybe I should just make the whole thing one big partition? Or install to a smaller stick (I have a 64GB and an 8GB) and use the 128GB for file space only.

[whatthefunk]

Did you use sudo?

[soundchaser59]

Did you use sudo?

I knew before I even finished reading it what you meant...... darn it. Yes, someone in another thread told me that.

[soundchaser59]

couple of extra questions.....

What might be examples of good times to use su? When would I want to switch user? And how does the root pwd get set or how do I know what it is?

EDIT: Mint has no root account, using sudo + my pwd in its place.

And I like to think I'm sharp enough (maybe I should say less dull) that I would not forget and leave my system logged on as #.

Where is that darn google bookmark when I need it.......

EDIT: Now I'm reading that Mint does not reliably handle persistence if the boot and rw partitions are on the same device.

[oshunluvr]

With most *Ubuntu distros, "su" is not implemented. It's considered by some to be more secure not having a root account password. The Kubuntu method is to use "sudo" for command line commands requiring root access, "kdesudo" to open a GUI program with root access (rarely needed except for Dolphin or something like that). If you're going to do a mess of "sudo" commands you can use "sudo -i" which is the same as "su" except you don't have to give the root account it's own password.

There are other things you can to do as well; for Dolphin there is "rootactions service menu" which adds root commands to Dolphin via the right-click menu removing the need to use "kdesudo dolphin" and you can add your additional file systems (hard drives and partitions) to fstab and use the option "user" which gives any user the ability to mount and unmount a file system without needing sudo rights.

If you really want "su", then create a password for root.

[soundchaser59]

I think I like the idea of using sudo for everything, as the grey geek guy tried to explain in another thread. I edited my grub loader using sudo and made it so that it no longer times out in 10 seconds. It will now pause indefinitely until I manually select an OS to boot to.

Next challenge will be sharing a folder on the home workgroup so that others can get to the contents. Made me briefly wonder if I need to set up a file server some day.