[Fwd: FEISTY RESTARTS ALL ON ITS OWN!]

[Peter Whittaker]

On Mon, 2007-02-04 at 21:01 -0400, Maurice Murphy wrote:
> Checking appropriate bug reports, it appears that an upgrade to 
> 2.6.20-11 may fix this problem.  How do I do this upgrade?   I will have 
> to give detailed instructions to my son in TO.  Thanks, Maurice

Ah, the dangers of installing beta software!

Generally speaking, Ubuntu will detect that there are updates available.

Tell your son to close all open applications and to look in the system
status bar in the top right corner of the screen for a little orange
icon with a white star in the centre. If it's there, there are updates
available. He can click on that icon and the right things should happen.

If the star isn't there, he can invoke update-manager directly: System,
Gnome control centre, update manager (Or system, administration, update
manager, if you configured the machine to use old style menus).

The "right things" are that update-manager will display a list of
applicable updates, your son will click "install updates", will be
prompted for his password, and the updates will be applied (time for
coffee, if there are a lot).

When update-manager is done, it will indicate that his system is up to
date, and, if the kernel was updated, a reboot will be suggested
(circular arrow icon in the system status bar, where the star used to
be).

So far, so good, pretty easy to do.

Now here's where things get tricky. As noted, update-manager will ask
for his password. This is because update-manager needs administrative
privileges to run, and it asks for his password to confirm that he wants
to perform an administrative action.

But not all users on a Linux system can invoke administrative actions by
default. Usually, when Ubuntu is installed, it asks for a first userid,
and it gives that first userid the ability to invoke administrative
actions. Other users added afterwards generally do not have this
privilege.

So if you installed Ubuntu, used maurice as the first user, then set up
an account for your son, sonOfMaurice won't have this privilege.

The simplest way to solve this is to tell your son the userid and
password you entered when you installed Ubuntu, and have him start a
Gnome session with these. Then when he runs update-manager, he can enter
your password again, and everything should be fine.

Once the update is complete and he reboots, he can go back to logging in
as sonOfMaurice; maurice will be his "privileged account".

There are other ways of addressing the password problem, should it
occur, but I won't go into detail, as this email would grow without
bound. Let's burn that bridge if we get to it.

Refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo for more on
privileged access.

pww

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