How do I make a user have admin rights, as in, same rights as root? I know this may be a bad thing, but I want my user account to have full access, at least until I setup everything, then I can always downgrade to regular user or power user.

Also how do I get rid of that vista-like nag, the "please enter password:" thing whenever I go to do something?

Using Ubuntu 8.10

add them to the sudo users or if it is for yourself, login as root, which is a bad idea BTW

This is for your safety, and only for system task.
open a terminal, su to root and you can do whatever you want.

This kind of behavior makes an OS unsafe.

I know about su as root as I do that for server tasks but for desktop / GUI I want root access from the get go, but without logging in as root. This way once everything is setup I can just disable it. But I wont stuff to happen under my profile, not the root one.

Keep in mind this is a private PC so it's not like someone can come behind me and start hacking away if I leave for 2 minutes, so I'm not really concerned about the "bad idea" part of it. It's a private pc. I just don't want to get nagged everywhere I click.

Pull up a terminal Applications > accessories >> terminal,


and type or copy & paste the following code into terminal.

press enter and enter your regular user password,
and edit the sudoers file accordingly.

if you want a user to have similar rights as the Super User Linux is not the place to do it. As stated before use sudo if you need rights if you get an error about user is not in sudoers file then add the user to /etc/sudoers and add the user to the group "wheel" using the command
Hope this helps.

ok I realize it's not good to do, but I just need to know how to do it. Sudo only works when using command line. I want to be able to run stuff like the package manager or change the resolution (just examples) without having to login as root. It's counter productive to keep using two logins. I run as an administrator account in Windows all the time and never had any issues. Nobody is going to walk behind me when I'm gone and start messing up stuff so not really the end of the world. If I open a malicious thing by accident, chances are it will know how to circumvent the security anyway (almost all viruses have privilege escalation), like all the windows viruses do, so that's a non issue. I'm sure if I opened a script that did rm -rf / I'd be dead in the water no matter what.

There is gksudo for gnome tasks btw