Setting Up Sudo in Fedora 14

Fedora, like all other Linux distributions, has a root user and has individual users. The root is the “superuser”, somewhat similar to “Administrator” in Windows.

Use the personal account you created at First Boot for daily use. You should use ‘root’ only for administration/configuration. To run as ‘root’ use su or sudo commands. However sudo requires setup. As root run:

echo 'loginname ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Where 'loginname' is your user account.
Use 'ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' if you don't want to be prompted a password.
If you are prompted for a password with 'sudo' it is the user password, 
not root.

Example:

[chris@chris ~]$ su
Password:    <--- Enter root password

[root@chris ~]# echo 'chris ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers
[root@chris ~]# exit
exit

The following is an example of how sudo lets you execute root commands:

[chris@chris ~]$ du -sh /root
du: `/root': Permission denied  <--- Fails!!!

[chris@chris ~]$ sudo du -sh /root
163M    /root                   <--- Works!!!