1.33 November 2, 2004
User Administration Adding a User for Daily Use

Working as root on a Unix/Linux system is dangerous and should be avoided as much as possible. Therefore it is strongly recommended to add a user for day-to-day use.

The groups the user is member of define what activities the user can perform. The following table lists a number of important groups you might wish to use:

audiobe able to access the audio devicescdrombe able to access cdrom devicesfloppybe able to access floppy devicesgamesbe able to play gamesusbbe able to access USB devicesvideo be able to access video capturing hardware and doing hardware acceleration wheelbe able to use su
Group Description

For instance, to create a user called john who is member of the wheel, users and audio groups, log in as root first (only root can create users) and run useradd: 

Login: root
Password: (Your root password)

# useradd -m -G users,wheel,audio,tty -s /bin/bash john
# passwd john
Password: (Enter the password for john)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter the password to verify)

If a user ever needs to perform some task as root, they can use su - to temporarily receive root privileges. Another way is to use the sudo package which is, if correctly configured, very secure.

Optional: Install GRP Packages This part is for GRP users only. Other users should skip this part and continue with Where to go from here?.

Now that your system is booted, log on as the user you created (for instance, john) and use su - to gain root privileges: 

$ su -
Password: (Enter your root password)

Now we need to change the Portage configuration to look for the prebuilt binaries from the second CD (Gentoo Packages CD). First mount this CD: 

(Put the Gentoo Packages CD in the CD tray)
# mount /mnt/cdrom

Now configure Portage to use /mnt/cdrom for its prebuilt packages: 

# ls /mnt/cdrom

(If there is a /mnt/cdrom/packages directory:)
# export PKGDIR="/mnt/cdrom/packages"

(Otherwise:)
# export PKGDIR="/mnt/cdrom"

Now install the packages you want. The Packages CD contains several prebuilt binaries, for instance KDE: 

# emerge --usepkg kde

Be sure to install the binaries now. When you do an emerge --sync to update Portage (as you will learn later), the prebuilt binaries might not match against the ebuilds in your updated Portage. You can try to circumvent this by using emerge --usepkgonly instead of emerge --usepkg.

Congratulations, your system is now fully equiped! Continue with Where to go from here? to learn more about Gentoo.