Feisty screen resolution problem

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 5/4/07, Jack Bowling <jbinpg at shaw.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 09:49:25PM -0400, Alfred wrote:
>
> At the risk of coming across as some PAF (Pedantic Old Fart), the "su"
> command actually started life as an abbreviation for "substitute user"
> not "super user". But since most *nixes adopted the role of root as
> Supreme Commander, its original meaning was subsumed. It still has all its original powers: you can "su" to whatever user is on your system as long as you know their passwords.


As only a half-old-fart, I didn't the meaning of "su" came from
"substitute".  Thanks for this!

I use su quite regularly to login into other accounts on the system:
so something like "su - daniel" to login into the user account
"daniel", if I know the password of that account.

If you don't know that password of that account, and you have
administrator privileges on that computer, you can get into a
super-user prompt first ("sudo -i"), then do the "su - daniel" trick.
Doing a su from within root  will not ask you for a password for the
accounts you are trying to access.


-- 
Daniel Robitaille