New User and Package Management

General system Newbie
1

I’ve been using EndeavorOS for a couple of years first on i3WB and currently on LXQT. I have always been the only user and never had any issues. I recently added a user account for my wife and have a question regarding package management. It appears that I have to run updates for both users. When I try to run updates in her account using pacman using sudo pacman -Syu, it assumes that she is the sudo user and asks for her password but she is not part of the sudoers group. How can I run updates in her user account using my credentials? Sorry if this is a basic question that I should already know the answer after having used Linux OS’s for many years but I’m stumped.

2

It is enough if the user is added in the wheel group, then the user has the root authorization through Sudo. In LXQT you can set it in the settings.

3

Use su and then exit that shell when you are done.

Alternatively, you could her account sudo rights for only pacman so she could do updates but not perform other functions as root.

4 Likes
4

nice have tested it with su, easy :+1:

5

Thanks all. I will give your suggestions a try.

6

Make an alias into her ~/.bashrc:

alias update='su -c "pacman -Syu"'

Then she can run command update and give the root password.

Maybe this is a language barrier (I’m not native English speaker) but if you take care of maintaining the machine, why would she need to update it?

1 Like
7

OP just needs to switch to his own user account in terminal, before doing any admin task. Like this for example:

[wife@mysharedpc ~]$su - myownaccount
Password:   # enter password of user <myownaccount>
[myownaccount@mysharedpc ~]$ pwd
/home/myownaccount
[myownaccount@mysharedpc ~]$ sudo pacman -Syu
...
...
[myownaccount@mysharedpc ~]$ exit
[wife@mysharedpc ~]$

Info: su --help and man su