Superuser Owner Permissions

Support & Help Requests
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I got an old laptop that was thrown away at my work.
I checked it and the main problems were.
--It had no power supply. - But I saw that it was working with a laboratory power supply and that it would boot, charge and the battery was fine. So I bought a power supply.
--Low memory. - But it had a free slot. - So I bought a memory module and that was it.
--250 GB mechanical HDD. - In the future it can be changed for an SSD to gain capacity and speed.

The computer was running Windows 7. So to improve its performance I installed Ubuntu MATE 22.04.4 LST and it worked perfectly. Another old computer recovered.

2nd generation i3 processor and 8 GB of RAM.

The thing is that my brother-in-law's laptop (a Linux neophyte) has broken down so I'm going to give it to him.

I created a new user and gave him sudo permissions.

My surprise was that when I tried to install things (to teach my brother-in-law how to do it) either through the software-boutique store of welcome or Synaptic from his new user. It asks me for the owner's password. That is, the root password. And of course, that password is personal and I don't want to give it to him. I want to keep a root user on the system for future reconfigurations. I don't care if he also has administrator permissions, that's why I created a user with sudo permissions for him. But I don't understand why for these two applications and having sudo permissions he asks me for the password of another administrator user and not his own.

Through the terminal, there is no problem in opening both applications as superuser and having them work and install perfectly with:

$ sudo software-boutique
$ sudo synaptic

Or pass to root and open them too.

$ su -i

"# software-boutique"
"# synaptic"

But this shouldn't be the case.
The computer is for a novice user, I don't want him to have to use the command line to use the graphical programs to be able to install software. I should be able to do it more easily.

So, the question is how can I make a newly created user be able to use both "software-boutique" and "synaptic" without loading them through the command line so that when installing applications from them it doesn't ask for the system owner's password?
This new user has sudo permissions, but is not the system owner because the system owner is the one who installed the OS.

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you have things confused ...

  • user tom installs um22.04 with sudo privs.
  • control panel | add another user, mary, with sudo and their own pw.
  • You make user mary default.
  • Upon reboot, laptop starts with user mary who can install anything.
  • Users tom and mary have sudo but different passwords.

Also, do not run commands as root (#), you have sudo.

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A pretty good explanation of sudo and root:

1 Like
4

Ok. Okay.
Solved.

$ sudo adduser new_user groups_to_add

I've added all the groups that the owner has.
Which can be seen with.

$ id owner_user

Now you can log in and use both the store and synaptic with your own admin password.

3 Likes