Getting to the Root

I have been asked many times how to become root in Ubuntu. I often reply, “you don’t need to be root; just use sudo”. Some folks just can’t stand not having root access all the time. So in my quest to add something worth while every day, I’ll post a quick tutorial on how to become root and know the root password. First thing’s first….I don’t recommend this. You can severely cripple your system if you aren’t careful, so don’t come crying to me if you follow this and then accidently rm -fR / or something crazy like that.

First from a terminal window type sudo su – . Enter your password and you are now the equivelant of root (well, you actually ARE root according to whoami) From here you can type passwd and change the root password. I recommend using something besides “password” but security is up to you. Now you can login to the system as root…simple eh? Now you can say “Bow before me, for I am ROOT!!! Mwahahaha” if you like….enjoy the power

Dale