Thanks. I cannot abide the control-freakishness of the front end, which means I can't use it as a home PC. At work, however, I'm looking to customize a computer to do just one operation, from command-line, and yet still getting standardization in hardware, so this might be the ticket.
I'd really suggest you try the standard Terminal without resorting to root.
So much more secure. And you can almost always find ways to get around lack of root unless you're doing deep administrative tasks.
For instance, I'm on satellite internet and get a round-trip ping of about 480ms. It really slows down my DNS lookups to refresh FR and other websites. So I implemented a caching nameserver using named and BIND.
macosxhints.com:
Speed internet browsing via a local domain name server
It's not for everyone but if you have dialup or satellite, it's a real lifesaver. That page shows how you can do a lot of the stuff that might normally be done in root just by using 'sudo bash' instead. Works beautifully.