Re: cannot su

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Gerginski" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 6:37 AM
Subject: [gentoo-newbies] cannot su


>
>
> First, I'd like to say my gentoo system has been progressing nicely.  I
> only have a few small problems left.  The one of most concern is that I
> cannot su to the root user.  When I am logged in in a terminal, I cannot
> attain root priveledges with su, it just says
>
> su: Permission denied
> Sorry

Sigh, and I have to send from Outlook Express to a public list--how
embarrassing.

First the answer--you have to add the user to the wheel group. Rather than
tell you how to do it, I'm going to give you the lecture. :)

This is a Frequently Asked Question, and as such is covered in the Faq both
on Gentoo Forums and the Gentoo web site.

Part of being a newcomer of course, is not knowing about finding these
resources.  As a rule though, in Linux and other open source software,
there's almost always a faq, or other means to at least begin to try to
solve your problem.

As this is a newbies list :) of course, people sometimes don't yet know
this. I'm going to also take the liberty of sending you to a page I made for
a relatively strict mailing list,
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/newbieguide.html
Check the links on that, especially the How to Ask Questions the Smart Way
which tells about how one might research things themselves.

This is not a criticism--again this is a newbie list, and it's expected that
part of that is learning about these things--and being told them in a nice
way, (which I ~hope~ I'm doing) because it's a newbies list--sigh, now that
I've made you read the lecture, I'll answer the rest of the question. :)

To add the user to wheel--say the user's name is matt, you'd simply add

usermod -G users,wheel mat

HTH
Scott