Apologies for the potentially newbie question, but you gotta start somewhere ...

Together with some friends, we have just setup a Linode to host, among other things, SMF forums.

The gent who has setup the Linode is not himself techie at all, and a couple of us have offered to manage that side of things. We only just have the linode setup and are at the stage where we need to start installing the components needed to get SMF up and running.

As far as we understand it (and maybe we're wrong), we need ssh access to do this, and (we think) we have the Linux skills to take it from there.

Problem is this - right now, we only have highly privileged accounts on the Linode, rather than root access.

Would we be right in assuming that ssh is only accessible to the root account itself, or is there something he can do to give access to our accounts?

Hope this makes sense, and thanks in advance for any replies.

By default, you can connect to SSH from root and whatever new users you create. If you create a new user as root, you'll be able to connect to it through SSH. You won't have permissions to install/configure stuff through apt-get though.