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:
| Group | Description |
| audio | be able to access the audio devices |
| cdrom | be able to directly access optical devices |
| floppy | be able to directly access floppy devices |
| games | be able to play games |
| portage | be able to use emerge --pretend as a normal user |
| usb | be able to access USB devices |
| plugdev | Be able to mount and use pluggable devices such as cameras and USB sticks |
| video | be able to access video capturing hardware and doing hardware acceleration |
| wheel | be able to use su |
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:
Code Listing 1.1: Adding a user for day-to-day use |
Login: root Password: (Your root password) # useradd -m -G users,wheel,audio -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.
Now that you've finished installing Gentoo and rebooted, if everything has gone well, you can remove the downloaded stage3 tarball and Portage snapshot from your hard disk. Remember that they were downloaded to your / directory.
Code Listing 1.1: Removing the stage3 tarball |
# rm /stage3-*.tar.bz2*
|
Code Listing 1.1: Removing the Portage snapshot |
# rm /portage-latest.tar.bz2*
|