On Wed, 8 May 2019 14:09:16 -0400 Gene Heskett <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm also well pleased that I'm not being chastised for winders here, > thank you very much for that. On the whole, Debian is for grown-ups, not the Linux nutters. I've earned a fair bit of money from Windows in the past, and I still need a portable Windows machine for a few external peripherals and to run my government's tax software. I actually have two now, but the netbook was explicitly bought to be a Debian machine and I'm just mildly happy that Win10 still runs, mostly for occasions like this. Simplest way now to get a command prompt: Right-click the white Windows symbol at the left end of the taskbar, select Run, type cmd and Return. It's a bit primitive compared to a *nix shell, but it does a few jobs fairly well. If you do need more oomph, higher up on the same right-click menu is Windows PowerShell, which I've only ever needed to use on servers. Also further up on the same menu is Network Connections. Open this and towards the bottom right is Change Adaptor Options. Click here, then right-click over the Ethernet entry, and Properties will give you the protocol selection and configuration box you haven't found. The first Windows user *still* is root, so it should let you straight into the Properties. You want the Windows, right-click menu again for Settings, then Accounts, which will let you as root create new accounts and (*after* you set up another administrator account) will let you demote your current user to unprivileged. That's a one-way street, of course, you'll need to login as the administrator if you want to promote it again. Most commands can be given from an unprivileged account, when you will need to enter administrator credentials for the kind which would require root on *nix. It isn't sudo, it doesn't have a timeout, you need to re-enter credentials for each task. If you left-click on the Windows icon, you get the dreadful Win8 tile thing, but at least it has a program list on the left. Down near the bottom are a few Windows directories, including Administrative Tools. An unprivileged user can right-click on these programs and select Run as Administrator, then give credentials. It is possible to do almost anything (finally) as an unprivileged user if you know the admin password. Even Win7 needed an admin login to do quite a few things. Best of luck. Just don't ever say 'yes' to anything it offers to do for you. Even Firefox on Windows is...pushy... it wants you to set up an account and all that nonsense. -- Joe
