su to root in terminal doesn't seem to pass the entire session root access.... I did think of that and try it - failed.
su'ing to root from a terminal started under your X session will not give root the ability to run GUI tools.
There is no "good" way to give root the ability to run a GUI tool, which is why MDK-ish distributions try to use tools that understand when they need privs, and to do the job themselves (after prompting).
An MDK user will be able to give a concrete example, I hope.
dmesg can be really long - can anyone tell me what I should be filtering on and give me some pointers on how to filter? I recall you use grep for this, but I don't recall all the right parameters, if there's a grep expert in the house I'd love a pointer or to.
First of all, scan it by hand - "$ dmesg | less" will help. Then perhaps just cut and paste the bits you like into an email.
Grepping for things works best when you know in advance what they are supposed to be :-) so you could try "$ dmesg | grep eth" but that would only match the literal lines, and might miss the error emssages around them. "$ dmesg | grep -A 3 -B 3 eth" will give three lines either side of the matches ...
-jim
