In general, root privileges are granted to you by the administrator of the system, the person(s) that have set up the workstation.
In particular, if you installed the system, you already will have root permissions. The first user created on an Ubuntu system during installation has root permissions. A user with root permissions can execute commands with these priviledges by preceding these with sudo
, e.g. sudo make install
.
Question 1: should I have to have a root privileges for installations
on my personal workstation?
If you want to install software, then, yes, you will need root privileges.
Question 2: If answer to Q1 is "yes", how to get root privileges on my
personal workstation?
We do not know about your situation. If you installed the system, you already have. If you did not, you will need to ask to the person that set up your system. That person may only allow you these permissions provided you are sufficiently trained in managing a Linux system. Acting as root, it is very easy to break a system if you do not know what you are doing.
If your user has root privileges, you can install software using the graphical tools. The system will ask your user password if it needs to perform an action as root. As indicated before, the sudo
command allows you to execute a terminal command with root priviledges.
Question 3: If answer to Q1 is "no", how to complete installation if
make install asks for creating a directory in root-controlled
directory?
It is clear by now that you need root permissions to modify files and directories in the system directory.