Admin vs. regular user?

A

anilsen

Registered
I have startet to use OS X on my iBook just a few days ago. I have 2 accounts an admin and a regular user the latter intended for daily use. I understand that this is recommended with UNIX.
Now my problem is that I constantly find myself loggin in as admin so I've begun to think I might stay logged in as that and drop the restricted user mode. As I am the only one using the iBook other destructive users access directly at the keyboard is not a problem (unless my unconsious second self has some nasty things in mind;) ). Any other concerns I should have being logged in as admin for daily use?

Regards

Anders
 
Is there anything you are doing which requires you to be admin?

I manage with an ordinary account and then either "su root" or exec the command with "sudo".

You can see what they do with the "man" command (there, did it, mentioned all of the unix commands i know)
 
Well at the moment I do a lot of downloading new apps and installing them and fiddeling with system settings.

The commands you specify sounds nice as a more direct way to log into root than the GUI way. Couldn't make it work though. Read the man pages and tried "su root" then typed in the admin password but got the reply "su:sorry".
Can't make out from the man pages what I am doing wrong. Could you maybe give me a clue?

Thanks

Anders
 
Well first off, 'su' is for the root user. You should be using 'sudo' unless you have set up the root account and are completely sure of what you are doing.
I am the only user on my iBook, and I have three accounts set up, all admins.
alex: me
dave: my dad, who uses the iBook about once a month. I set this up so he doesn't mess with my settings ;)
admin: a backup account that I set up in case I do something stupid and mess up alex. I found this out the hard way messing with NetInfo. Messed up alex, but lucky for me, Dad was able to log in and fix the problem.

In short, I think you should be fine running as an admin, I certainly have not had any problems!
 
Well there' a lot to learn here. I thought that admin and root were the same :rolleyes: . If not I guess I will normally have no need for root access but wil do fine with the admin account. The tip about an extra admin account sounds like a very good idea indeed. I will convert my regular user account to admin straight away.
I'll do some more investigation on sudo as I will try fiddling with pmset which apparently must be run as root. I hope to be able to invoke processor recycling on my iBook when running on battery.

Thanks

Anders
 
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