Debian – Run application as root without sudo

Edit /etc/default/locale and set the contents to:

LANG="nl_NL.UTF-8"

You can check which locales you currently have generated using:

locale -a

You can generate more by editing /etc/locale.gen and uncommenting the lines for the locales that you want to enable. Then you can generate them by running the command:

locale-gen

You can find a list of supported locales in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

There is more information available on the Debian wiki.

The root account is necessary on servers for sure, but I prefer granting sudo rights, especially when there are several users on the machine, and this for several reasons:

• I don't use sudo only to grant ALL rights for ALL commands, but also to grant specific rights as a specific user to specific commands.
• By assigning users to functional groups, I can manage their rights with these groups in sudoers instead of managing users individually.
• sudo accesses are logged in auth.log by default, including which users used sudo at what time.
• sudo allows to manage the configuration for several machines with one file.
• each user keeps their own password, so there is no need to change the root password when a user leaves.

As for managing it with scripts, new versions of sudo support inclusions, but I prefer to use puppet and set classes that concatenate sudoers contents.

Puppet can also be associated with Augeas to manage your sudoers file.