This has two parts.

First, sudo, which ubuntu encourages using rather than su. Sudo can be set up to allow users to do just some things as root rather than everything, by editing the file /etc/sudoers.

Second, various Ubuntu programs that run as root. Some expect that the user's $PATH starts with /sbin and /usr/sbin, and run programs without specifying the complete file name.

If a user has limited sudoers privileges, then various Ubuntu-supplied programs can often be tricked into granting the user complete root access.

For example, sudo apt-get install foo will often run ldconfig, start-stop-daemon and more. Not always, but often enough to make it a FAQ.

I feel sure that whoever reports this will be told by the sudoers maintainers that the problem is with e.g. apt-get, and by the apt-get people that the problem is with sudoers. Both are reasonable responses, but I'd rather write code than argue. So all I'll do is publish this.

I've wanted more RAM and a third monitor for a while. Upgrade time. I hate upgrading hardware, it's the worst of chores.

The new hardware is a Zotac Fusion ITX A motherboard including a Radeon 6310 graphics blah, a passive Radeon HD5450 graphics card (actually a 5430 chip), and the rest is from from the previous libertango: (more…)

My previous laptop (a Lifebook P7210) grew bad-tempered. Investigate or replace? Stupid question considering how much netbooks cost.

My new laptop is a Nokia Booklet 3G, a moderately expensive netbook with good battery lifetime, a 3G modem, a high-resolution screen and no fan. Ubuntu 10.10 runs well (more…)

Three million web forum postings contain wrong, misguided or overly complex solutions, so here:

When ubuntu complains WARNING: untrusted versions of the following packages will be installed, that's because of bad data in the keyring for ubuntu packages, which is part of the package ubuntu-keyring. (more…)

Some fonts have already been updated to include ẞ, including the ones I generally use (on ubuntu 10.04). Lovely.

Sad to say, but I recently installed ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S4572. I installed the minimal system followed by xubuntu-desktop and gcompris: xfce is supposed to be better for small boxes and gcompris is the whole point. (more…)

Here's what I did to get a sensibly large character repertoire for my keyboard, using ubuntu 9.10.

First, read any of the fine explanations of the compose key and configure some suitable key.

Next, explain to ubuntu that you do wish to XIM:

im-switch -s default-xim

By this time, X applications will read your ~/.XCompose file when they start, so set it up. There's a large repertoire on github:

cd ~/src git clone git://github.com/leoboiko/pointless-xcompose.git

Here's my ~/.XCompose (more…)