su and regular users

[jjpetrucelli]

when i login as root i cant reach the internet, my wireless isnt even lit up. When i login as the regular user i can see / use my wireless. I can start some programs as regular user but then when im root i get errors such as 'no protocol specified'. I often switch between user and su so that i can edit configs and such. How can i get some consistency here? Im obviously a newbie can you point me?

 

[franklin97355]

The wireless should start up in the init scripts and be usefull to all users. Also root should have access to all files and programs unless you set them to be executed by the user/group only and root isn't a member. Root's search path is not the same as a regular user so some programs need to have the whole path or ./ in front of the command. What distro are you using?

 

[jjpetrucelli]

i have installed the newest version of knoppix, which is debian, no? It appears that on load that linux does detect my wireless but when i login, depending on who i login as depends on if it will see my wireless. For example Ive been testing the security on my sys and i logged in as user and started up kismet, well i had to change the config file, it just so happens that i needed to turn the machine off and when i started back up i logged in as root so that i could just go in and change the .conf file to work with my card (instead of doing a 'sudo' while logged in earlier as reg user) but then i went about my business and typed kismet at the prompt and got the above mentioned error. and i see that my card has no lights, the browsers cant pull up anything etc...So i end up logging back in as my reg user and go to the prompt and type kismet and bingo up and running. I was also attempting to start various other network tools when logged in as root and recieved the same error message...I dunno? One thing I have yet to try is to switch users without restarting. I find it to be a little weird huh?

 

[franklin97355]

Yeah, try using su from the users account and see what happens to the network. Also check to make sure root can see the path to kismet. Like I said root's path is different than the default for users.