thank you thank you thank you

the wiki i refer to is: http://wiki.maemo.org/Root_access

weird, I swear i had installed rootsh package- and that was why it was giving me that strange error message, but just to be complete I tried again, now and it installed! now when i try the same command sudo gainroot i am awarded with the hash prompt! wow that was easy!

and all I wanted root for is any of the commands in the /sbin !
i dont understand why without root if you type in something simple like ifconfig it says ifconfig not found! isn't that misleading i could see all those beautiful commands in /sbin shouldnt it say escalate privileges?
anyway, now that i am the all powerful superuser it works great!

I am very excited to start hacking away on this machine I am blown away that i can load up wireshark or hydra or ettercap!
...and of course the first step was sudo gainroot
thanks again everyone for helping me take that first step,
I am very very impressed by this awesome digital community!!