On 07.06.20 02:42, Keith bainbridge wrote:
On 7/6/20 8:30 am, Marco Möller wrote:I would easily agree with you concerning not to log into a graphical session as the user root. But Dolphin is also not running with sudo prepended.And here I was thinking that the dolphin issue ran here for several days, just a few weeks ago.And yes - not good idea to log into any GUI. My experience is I can't - I guess by design
Yes, design options exist. However, I never tried out if the user root could be blocked by the graphical session manager only, in the case of KDE usually sddm is in use. But I know that the login of user root can be blocked in general: when nowadays installing Debian, then there is offered to keep the root account deactivated, which is achieved by simply not assigning it a password but to leave the root's password empty and then activating the sudo mechanism for the during installation created normal user. Then the login as user root is disabled in general, not applying only to GUI login but also to text terminal login. As a consequence it is always required to log in as a normal user and using the command sudo would be the way to run commands with root permissions. The deactivation of the root account could also be achieved later on, any time, not only during installation of the system, by changing the password of user root to an empty string. But I am afraid that you then will have to care yourself to set up sudo properly when still possible to do so as user root.
Interestingly, although having disabled the root account during installation and having sudo automatically configured during installation, it by default appears to still be allowed to run command "sudo su -", which still lets you run a root terminal once you have been logged in as the normal user and knowing the user's password needed to use sudo! So, for repetitive work requiring root permissions it at least is not necessary to prepend sudo to all root commands again and again - but this is still not reaching the comfort like running Dolphin with root permissions would do, and Dolphin also resists to start up when called from such root xterminal running in the normal user session.
Reminding on the question of the OP:If in need to handle files with root permissions, I simply use sudo and CLI commands. Remember the above mentioned comfort option to invoke a root terminal by command 'sudo su -'. Then, besides on the CLI running nano, cp, rm and mv, maybe having available mc, using the command chown should be considered as well. If I am pretty sure (this is of course important) that it will not do any harm to change the ownership of files or directories to the group and name of my normal user, then chown is fast to do and afterwards I can continue to work with Dolphin as my normal user.