UBUNTU AND SUDO

    One of the recurrent problems for regular users is how to perform certain tasks that require superuser privileges. These tasks include installing and updating software, editing system configuration files, and accessing devices. In the Win-dows world, this is often done by giving users administrative privileges. This allows users to perform these tasks. However, it also enables programs executed by the user to have the same abilities. This is desirable in most cases, but it also permits malware (malicious software) such as viruses to have free run of the computer.
     In the Unix world, there has always been a larger division between reg-ular users and administrators, owing to the multiuser heritage of Unix. The approach taken in Unix is to grant superuser privileges only when needed. To do this, the su and sudo commands are commonly used.
     Up until a few of years ago, most Linux distributions relied on su for this purpose. su didn’t require the configuration that sudo required, and having a root account is traditional in Unix. This introduced a problem. Users were tempted to operate as root unnecessarily. In fact, some users operated their sys-tems as the root user exclusively, because it does away with all those annoying “permission denied” messages. This is how you reduce the security of a Linux system to that of a Windows system. Not a good idea.
     When Ubuntu was introduced, its creators took a different tack. By default, Ubuntu disables logins to the root account (by failing to set a password for the account) and instead uses sudo to grant superuser privileges. The initial user account is granted full access to superuser privileges via sudo and may grant sim-ilar powers to subsequent user accounts.