hi ..

i installed Webmin on my machine redhat-8.0 and i does start.
the problem is i do not have the root password but do belong to the group of root during the webmin authentication it says fail to login . does webmin require the actual "root" and its password to login ???

Depends on how it is set up. I would suggest reading the docs first, there's some good parts on how to make Webmin use different types of authentication. If you choose PAM authentication, check if you got the required authen:am perl module installed.

By default webmin actaully just uses a "Webmin" password. You can accept the defaults when you install/set it up which is to make the Webmin/Admin account to be the root name and password. So, in actaulity, webmin has nothing to do with the system's "root" account; it just kind of coincidenally uses the same user/pass. What you can do, the easiest thing anyway, is have whoever has the Admin user/pass for Webmin make you a user account within webmin (the Webmin Users applet). And he can give you rights to all of the applets or a select few.

But like unSpawn said, you can make more exotic forms of authentication, but this would then also require the root user to do this so .. I think the first way is the simplest way.
*Emebedded