In this edition of Newbies, we’re going to talk about a number of administrative tasks that are essential for getting the most out your new Linux system. While some distributions do have slightly different administrative tools available, most versions of Linux are pretty much the same under the hood.
In this edition of Newbies, we’re going to talk about a number of administrative tasks that are essential for getting the most out your new Linux system. While some distributions do have slightly different administrative tools available, most versions of Linux are pretty much the same under the hood.
Red Hat 6.0, for example, offers a number of improvements to the Linux desktop environment, but the majority of the tools discussed in this article are available in Red Hat 5.2 and most other popular Linux distributions.
Adding User Accounts
Though you normally login to your Linux machine with your username and password, you can also login as “root.” During the installation process, a root account and password was created on your Linux system. This is also known as the “superuser” account, because whomever is logged in as root is able to read from or write to any file on the computer. For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, you need to be logged in as root to have the complete level of access and control required to do some administrative tasks. You’ll need to be logged in as root to do everything I describe in this column.
Now I don’t recommend that you login as root on a regular basis. Even the most experienced Linux user can make a mistake, after all, and when you’re logged in as root, mistakes can have some unfortunate consequences. Linux tends to assume that whoever is using the…
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