GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Getting Started with SUDO

The aim of wajig is to operate as much as possible as a user command and to do super user privileged commands as necessary (if that is how the system administrator wishes to allow a user to maintain their system). The easiest way to do this is to use the sudo package which will ask you for your password and then run the command as the super user. If you don't have sudo installed then wajig will use `su' to run as super user, but you will need to enter the super user password frequently. If `sudo' is installed but not set up for you to access the appropriate apt-get commands you will see a permission denied message.

Installing sudo is straight forward. As root run the command visudo to edit the configration file. Add the following lines in the appropriate (and obvious) places:

  Cmnd_Alias  APT = /usr/bin/apt-get, /usr/bin/apt-cache, /usr/bin/dpkg, \ 
                    /usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure, /usr/bin/dpkg-repack, \
                    /etc/init.d/*, /usr/sbin/update-alternatives, \
                    /usr/lib/apt-move/fetch, /usr/bin/dselect, \
                    /usr/bin/alien, /usr/sbin/apt-setup

and

  kayon      ALL=(ALL) APT

The user kayon can then run wajig commands that require super user permissions, and will be asked for their own password to do this.