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Minor clarification for why root may be needed #196

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9 changes: 8 additions & 1 deletion pages/docs/overview/faq.md
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Expand Up @@ -40,7 +40,14 @@ It's important that your administrator have all of the resources available to hi
## Basic Singularity usage

### Do you need administrator privileges to use Singularity?
You generally do not need admin/sudo to use Singularity containers but you do however need admin/root access to install Singularity and for some container build functions (for example, building from a recipe, or a writable image).
You generally do not need admin/sudo to use Singularity containers but you do however need admin/root access to install Singularity and for some container build functions (for example, building from a recipe — which typically
requires root privileges for running package managers like `apt` and `yum` — or creating a writable image).

<p align="center">
<img src="http://singularity.lbl.gov/assets/img/diagram/build_input_output.svg" width="400">
</p>

*Red means root is required*

This then defines the work-flow to some extent. If you have a container (whether Singularity or Docker) ready to go, you can run/shell/import without root access. If you want to build a new Singularity container image from scratch it must be built and configured on a host where you have root access (this can be a physical system or on a VM). And of course once the container image has been configured it can be used on a system where you do not have root access as long as Singularity has been installed there.

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