I know all the reasons not to run as root, but on rare occasions I do want to change to root using the su command. On other distributions I can do that by providing my password, as I'm in the administrators group. However, on Solus that doesn't work. Is it simply not possible to issue commands as root on Solus or must it be done some other way.

I do know about sudo, of course, and normally that works fine. But as I said, on very rare occasions I want to actually be root. Thanks for any help with this.

Logging in as root is not supported in our graphical environments. You can easily "be" root by logging in as your user account, opening up a terminal, and running sudo bash to open up a bash prompt as a super user. Alternatively you can use a TTY as root.

I was just about to answer my own question. It occurred to me that I might be able to use sudo to issue a passwd command for root, so I gave that a try and it worked fine. Now, in bash, I can use su to get a root prompt.

sudo -s is running a root shell, how much more root can you be?

Seems to be a number of ways to accomplish this. I prefer the su command that I've used elsewhere, but your method certainly works as well. Thanks for the suggestion.

Regarding root, I got carried away and forgot I was sudo'd to do some package management (removal)...and ended up running LibreOffice as root (have never done that before...and frankly scares me (lol)). Course this would only happen to a cmd-line junkie.

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  • Post #9

sudo su is another possibility to become root.

If I need to do a few commands as root, I generally use sudo -i. It's pretty similar to sudo -s mentioned earlier.

If I just need to edit a file as root, I generally use sudoedit (same as sudo -e). This will use the SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR environment variable value as the editor. On Solus it appears to default to nano. You can override it directly in your command, EDITOR=nvim sudoedit <file> for instance. Or you can override it permanently by setting one of those variables in your local or systemwide profile. (See this thread for more on that: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/439-setting-path-on-profile)