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RE: Gnome & GDM - root login?



Michael Dickey <mdickey@yahoo.com> wrote:

Seems a silly question, but...
Just installed Gnome & GDM on my son's computer along with a lot of the Debian-junior packages. Now I find that I cannot login as root - I always get the message "The system administrator is not allowed to login from this screen" I can do some system admin stuff from an xterm if I su root, but how do I actually do a root login and use Gnome as root so I can configure it?

Michael



There is a setting in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf you can change to allow root logins. Depending on the version of Debian you are using (and hence the version of GDM installed) the exact location may be different. I have not used Debian "Stable" in over a year, but here is the command from my Debian "Testing" install.

[security]
AllowRoot=true
AllowRemoteRoot=false
AllowRemoteAutoLogin=false
RelaxPermissions=0
RetryDelay=3
UserMaxFile=65536
SessionMaxFile=524288
VerboseAuth=false

The "key" line is the "AllowRoot=true" line. Also in the version of GDM that I have here (2.2.5.2-2 from "dpkg -l gdm"), you can edit these settings from the GDM splash screen...dunno about yours. Your best bet if you can login via XTERM is to manually edit the file with a text editor.

The GDM manual on my machine is an html document at:

The full gdm manual is installed as
       /usr/share/gnome/help/gdm/C/index.html on your system.
       This is only a brief summary - the HTML manual is the
       canonical documentation.


I find it fascinating reading <g>. There are LOTs of config "goodies" that you can do with GDM... things like putting a "face" browser with pics
of all the users, setting up XDMCP, etc.

Cheers,
-Don Spoon-









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