Is it possible to change the super user name?

I don't want to change it to "1337h4x0r", just "admin" or something. It just seems wrong to me to have a user called "root".

If this is possible, then is it posible to change "/root" to some other name? (no symlinkage)

/root is root's home directory, which is completely seperate from the root user. You can change that setting in the /etc/passwd file (but you'll need to move the directory itself by hand).

I don't see why you couldn't change the root username there as well; the UID and GID have both got to be 0 for a superuser, and various programs that change user (like su or shutdown) will stop working if they use the username rather than the UID (this would constitute a bug in such programs but not one that would get tested for very often).

root is a very standard name for a UNIX superuser — it stems from the idea of a hierarchy of users with inherited permissions; an idea that isn't used.

Why? Its been like this well, since, Unix was created. Why don't you setup another user with sudo rights? Then you won't ever need to login as root, well very rarely.

Security thru obscurity just doesn't work and there's no real valid reason you should change root's name.

It is not a security reason.

If you read the original post,
I am referring to the local usage of the word root, ie Synonym of sexual intercourse(noun and verb), and hence rooted, rooting, get a root etc. To me that's what root means. If the super user on your system was called f**k, would that make you particularly happy? So my "real valid reason" is just that I would prefer that the super user be called something else.

I'm not trying to offend any Unix aficionados, or get extra security by making would be attackers guess the name (as I said, I would call it admin), I just don't like "root" being a username.

I suppose that renaming root is possible, because, AFAIK, the GoboLinux project did it. See:
http://www.gobolinux.org

Yves.

It would seem that while renaming root is trivial (just edit the /etc/passwd, and if you have one, the /etc/shadow), programs will then hate you.

I renamed "root" to "admin", and that was ok, I could log in, do superuser things. The problem occured when I wanted to be a nomal user, and either su in a terminal, or run something like kde's "file manager (super user mode)", it refused to do anything. su returned an error along the lines of cannot find user root, and the other things I think might use su. So it appears that renaming root is a no go if you want things to still work.

Exactly like I said.. "there's no real valid reason you should change root's name" along with the security bit for all those other poeple who have asked thinking it would beef up their security on their system.

Want a user named admin, create one. Give him sudo access, done, everything else is happy.

su is the Switch User command. If you don't specify a username, the default is root, rather than the name of UID 0. You could always do instead of su.