Things to do.

When you install a Debian system, by default, you do not have admin rights. Coming from a Microsoft system, you might say, "What? That's stupid. I hate it... That's annoying... Gimme admin... I'll run as root!"

Don't do that.

When you are running as root, you open yourself up for all kinds of vulnerabilities. This is why some OS's are so easily hacked. Since people are running everything as root, then worms and viruses have total write access to system files. These little nasties can get into the system and really mess things up.

In other OS's, it's really hard to do something as admin for one command. At least, I don't know of how to do it.

In linux, you are given the option to run something as root by typing, "sudo" in front of it. For all intents and purposes, you are root for that command.

If you're running Debian from a net_inst, you do not have any sudoer privileges at all. Now this is a repeat of what I typed in a previous post, but it does bear repeating. You can add yourself to the sudoers list by typing the following commands:

su
(type root password)

visudo

This will put you into the root user and you will be editing the sudoers file.

scroll down the file until you see:

"root ALL=(ALL) ALL"

Under that, type:

"username ALL=(ALL) ALL"

Where username == the name that you log in under.

My recommendation is to only do this for one user. If you are working on another user account, you can always drop to terminal and change users with:

su username

You can even switch to root as you did previously, but don't. It's a bad idea. The more you do as root, the more likely you are to make a mess of things.

Enjoy Linux!