Administrative Priviledges in GNOME

[leveller]

I have a feeling this may be a bit of a stupid question as it seems like one that must have a very basic answer so for that I apologise but I have yet to come across or work out the solution. The problem I have is that I cannot do anything that requires administrator priviledges from within GNOME without doing it directly from a Terminal using the su command. The reason being is that GNOME will not allow me to log in as 'root' from the normal login screen. So therefore I cannot do something as simple as edit a text file that is not in /home/'my username' as I do not have the required permissions.

Could somebody please direct me to what I am obviously missing?

[roseway]

It's not necessary to log into a desktop as root to perform admin tasks, and it's really not a good idea either. You can run a text editor as root quite easily: in a terminal you can use su, then edit the file using the nano text editor, or you can run a gui text editor (e.g. gedit) as root by typing gksu gedit <filename>

[gradinaruvasile]

You can run graphical applications without terminal too.
Just press alt+f2, type in:
gksudo gedit filename

[leveller]

OK cheers, thanks for the advice.