Setting up sudo

Next, we will emerge sudo, which will allow you to do things as a super user from your own account. Think of it as a simple prefix that makes you god, but only when you need to be. Here's a great example.

# emerge -av app-admin/sudo

Now we'll need to add your account to the list of sudoers.

# nano -w /etc/sudoers

/etc/sudoers

Find the line that says

root    ALL=(ALL) ALL

and just below add

username	ALL=(ALL) ALL

As always, use ctrl-x to exit then save the file.

---

Note: using sudo

You can run any command as root from your user account using sudo by simply typing sudo before the command. Sudo will then ask you for your password. From now on you'll never need to use your root account or password unless it's an emergency and you're dealing with security issues or hardware failure.

---

Now that sudo is installed, log out of the root account.

# logout

Now enter your new credentials to log into the system.

login: username
password: <your password>
$ 

Nice work! You have a fully functional and secure Gentoo Linux system. But chances are you are going to require a graphical user interface of some sort. Let's move on to Configure X.