In this article I will walk you through the creation of new profiles and show you why you might want them.

Assumptions

First and foremost, this article assumes you actually use the terminal and assumes you use it a lot. The pedestrian user of the terminal might not see a need for multiple profiles for a terminal window. But if you use the terminal a lot, and for various reasons, you might see how multiple profiles can make a difference.

Creating new profiles

Figure 1

Let us first take a look at how profiles are created. To create (or edit) a profile click Edit > Profiles. This will bring up a new window (see Figure 1) where you can add, edit, or delete profiles at will.

As you can see, in Figure 1, I have two current profiles – default and “no trans”. My default profile fits in with my current desktop scheme (RGBA, with heavy transparency). There are times when I need to more closely evaluate text (such as when viewing top or combing through a configuration file. For those times I switch to the “no trans” profile which is a non-transparent profile I created.

To create a new profile click the New button. When you do this a small window will open where you give your new profile a name and choose which of your current profiles to base the new profile on. Let’s say, for the sake of example, I want to create a profile for any time I am using the terminal as the root user. This can come in very handy (and keep you from doing something you don’t want to do).  For this I am going to call the profile “Root” and base it on “no trans”. Once you’ve done that the main profile editor window will appear (see Figure 2) .

In this new window you can change quite a bit for your profile. For a profile to work as the administrative user you might want to do something like create a white background with red text, or a red background with black text. For such an instance I like to alter the Title and command to ensure there is no mistaking I am using the administrative user. To do this click on the Title and Command tab and then change the Initial title to be something like ROOT User: USE CAUTION. You can then select to prepend this title if the terminal command sends it’s own title (which is often the case).

Figure 3

The new “root” profile will look something like that in Figure 3.

Switching profiles

This is simple, and can be done on the fly. All you need to do is click Terminal > Change Profile and select the profile you want.

Final thoughts

Make use of the gnome-terminal profiles and your life will be much easier. There are a lot of reasons why you would want to use them and tons of modifications you can make to them.

Relax. Ubuntu was created so that “su” access wasn’t necessary. Instead Ubuntu employes the “sudo” utility which adds the standard user to the administrative group. Why did they do this? Simple. Ubuntu’s goal is to make their distribution the most user-friendly available. To that end the developers felt it necessary to “remove” the root user because the average user had little to no experience with such a beast. The average user certainly didn’t have to have “root” privileges to get around in the Windows operating system. Ubuntu figured this was the way to go. There were two ways around this – make the standard user a root user or just emply sudo and create an administrative group the standard user would belong to. Now the standard user could undertake admin tasks without having to understand the concept of a standard user versus a root user.

When you install Ubuntu you created a user and that user has a password. To handle most any “administrative” task all they have to do is use the “sudo” command so they can run commands as a different (in this case the administrative) user.

So if you want to issue a command that requires administrative access you would issue it by way of the sudo command like so:

sudo ADMIN_TASK

Where ADMIN_TASK is the actual administrative task you want to run. When you hit enter you will be asked for your password, at which point you will enter your standard user password.

But What About “su”?

I have run into instances where I have wanted to have actual root access. Although I don’t really recommend this (It is actually best to stick with the setup Ubuntu has created), you can create a root password by issuing the command:

sudo passwd root

When you press enter you will be prompted (twice) for a new password. Once you enter the password the second time your root password will be ready to use.

/etc/sudoers

The /etc/sudoers file is where you configure sudo. This file shouldn’t really be monkied with as the default should work perfectly for you. There is one particular line you should definitely avoid (of course I have to point it out so you will know which one to avoid.) Take a look at this line:

# %sudo ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

You probably have a good guess as to what that line would do if it were uncommented. Allow the sudo user access to root privileges without having to use a password. This should remain commented out so this option isn’t available.

Final Thoughts

The Ubuntu distribution has created one of the most user-friendly setups in Linux land. Taking advantage of sudo is one of the many ways Ubuntu achieves such a state. Understanding the sudo system will keep new Ubuntu users from pulling out their hair as they attempt to gain root privileges. New users? Nothing to see here…just go about your business. ;-)

Short time ago I found a nice online RSS aggregator called Rootly. Important thing is that you can customize your account very well. You can use their feed presets or even better insert your own feed addresses and create unique tabs. Rootly then collects all the news for you and displays them in a very clean and well styled interface.

You can choose in which tab your news will appear and the order of tabs too. I appreciate that this service mixes all news together and displays them on one page instead of dividing the feeds according to their source. I hope that in the future they’ll add at least one more option – the possibility to choose how many news you want to display on a single page.

And the best thing at the end – Rootly supports OpenID (read previous article for more info on that). Actually, when I found the service few weeks ago, I had some serious problems with logging in using OpenID among other minor troubles but at this time it looks like everything works fine already.

Rootly is not really an alternative if you are already using Netvibes for instance as your news aggregator. I’m basically using it at work because Netvibes has been banned there while Rootly has not. The interface of Rootly is not that intuitive and it takes a step longer to perform actions. Adding feeds for instance has to be done on a separate page while you can add them on the fly so to speak in Netvibes.