If you’re like most people, you probably use your computer for work and entertainment. But what if you could use your computer to do more? What if you could use it to do things that are outside of the scope of what a regular user can do? One way to do this is to start an Ubuntu Gnome application as root user. This article will show you how to do this. First, open a terminal window by clicking on the “Start” button on the taskbar and typing “terminal.” Once the terminal window is open, type in the following command: sudo su - This command will switch you into root user mode. Next, we’ll need to find the application we want to start as root user. To do this, type in the following command: which gnome-terminal ..
To run a command-line program with superuser(root) priviledges, you normally will preceed the command with “sudo”, as shown in this example:
Ubuntu provides a graphical alternative to the sudo command that you have probably seen if you try to run any administrative tool:
You can easily and quickly run any program as root by preceeding the command with the “gksu” command. For instance, let’s launch xterm as root by hitting Alt+F2 to bring up the quick run dialog:
We’ll first see the password dialog shown above, enter your password… and there we go – we now have a terminal running as root:
Easy stuff!
