Using Emacs as root ?

[William Case <billlinux@rogers.com>]

Hi;

Kind of an Emacs beginner's question.

I do only a little programming -- occasionally writing bash scripts;
that kind of thing.  I mainly use emacs from my desktop launcher to edit
text files like my .bashrc etc.

The other day I was reading up on man smb.conf in my gterminal and
wanted to make some minor changes to smb.conf.  I needed to open a new
tab in the gterminal; su; then run emacs /etc/samba/smb.conf.  That's OK
if that is what emacs is designed to do.  But is there a way to launch
emacs and use some command in the emacs input line that will directly
open a root protected file while I am user, perhaps combined with C-x
C-f?  Is there some key combination I can set up?
-- 
Regards Bill