Setting up sudo

Next, we will emerge sudo, which will allow you to do things as a super user from your own account.

emerge -av app-admin/sudo

Once sudo is installed, you may have to run

etc-update

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

nano -w /etc/sudoers

Find the line that says

root    ALL=(ALL) ALL

and just below add

<your username>		ALL=(ALL) ALL

and use ctrl-x to exit then save the file. A note about sudo- you can run any command using sudo, so long as you enter "sudo" before the command. Sudo will then ask you for a password. 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>

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. Whenever you want to run a command as root, all you need do is prefix that command with sudo.