Running apps as root?

[John]

Daniel Silverstone wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 18:20 +0200, Rudi von Staden wrote:
> 
>>I know how to get sudo working for me, but how would I go about, say,
>>using text editor to change my sources.list? Is there some way to run
>>it as root? I'm comfortable with vi, but I'm thinking of people who
>>have a catatonic response to the command line.
> 
> 
> Synaptic can edit your sources.list for you.
> 
> Alternatively... 
> 
> sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
> 
> ...seems to do the trick nicely.
> 
> D.
> 


Don't get too literal: sources.list is merely a fer-instance. Interpret 
it to mean any text file in /etc - there are not configuration utilities 
for all of them.


Alsom Rudi said "but I'm thinking of people who have a catatonic 
response to the command line," and I think that rules out your second.


Some time ago my boss was away for a few weeks and wanted to connect to 
the XServ at work.

After a few days of emailing and me examining logs to see where he was 
and what went wrong, he managed to enter the right ssh command to 
forward the AFP port. Next, he typed in the commandline something like this:
afp://192.168.7.5/

which of course did nothing useful.

The commandline is not a useful generic answer for anything. I say that 
as one who does most if his work at commandlines, in xterm, rxvt, gterm, 
konsole and honest-to-goodness linux consoles.