Login as root with LightDM? (Gentoo/Gnome 3)

ShadowOne333 · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2014 Posts: 58

Good day.

I ran an emerge @world recently (one week ago), and I wanted to switch from LXDM to LightDM.
However, since I am the person that handles everything in the PC, I do not have a user account.
Instead I login as root everytime I need to make some changes, and I login into the desktop environment.

The problem is that LightDM doesn't seem to have an option to login as root, even though I already enabled the manual login so that I get the "Other..." option in LightDM.
I enter "root" as user and my password, but LightDM refuses to login with the root user.

My question is, is there a way to make LightDM recognize the root user along with is password?

Thanks in advance!

Jaglover · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 11:53 pm Post subject:

You are mistaken, root is not user, root is administrator. The general consensus is the most stupid thing is to use your system as root. The second most stupid thing is to run X as root. You seem to be guilty in both counts.
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Zucca · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 12:00 am Post subject:

Yeah. I think that's a security feature of LightDM to be not be able login as root.
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Logicien · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 1:59 pm Post subject:

You must create a normal user account to resolv the problem. This imply that you will have to configure from the default your new user settings. You can use the su and sudo commands to get root previleges from a normal user session.

By this you can use root previleges the minimum time as possible, only when a normal user cannot do what you want, what is the best for security. The less you use root previleges the best it is to advoid nasty mistakes who can dammage the system too. A normal user is not allow to play out of his home directory.

These come from Unix like operating systems very basic knowledge to apply.
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Zucca · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 3:53 pm Post subject:

I have to add that if you and only you use that particular computer and you're perfect in executing commands and never use unstable programs, then why you even use display manager at all. Just have root log in automatically?
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ShadowOne333 · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2014 Posts: 58

I'm no noob, I know what I'm doing with the computer, that's why I'm the administrator of it.
It's just that I have everything (files, documents, notes, etc) in the root account, and I have always administrated everything using X as root.

I cannot make the computer auto-login to root however, since there are other users and this computer and that would give them instant access to the root account, which is something I don't think it's good.
I did try to make LightDM autologin to root, and that DID work, but as I mentioned, I cannot have that option enabled always.

Zucca · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 8:52 pm Post subject:

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21630