I've tried and tried to figure this one out on myself, but I've failed, so I'll pose the question to LQ, and get the probably ultrasimple answer.

I'm trying to edit

/boot/grub/menu.lst

But any changes I make cannot be saved unless I'm in root. I might be doing this wrong, but I cannot log into root or figure out how to open this file as the root user. I'm still somewhat new to Linux, so could someone please give me an idiot-friendly step-by-step of what to do to open, edit, and save this file as a root user?

Assume I've just booted Debian and logged in under my username. What do I do from here?

open a terminal, type
and give the root password
type
make the changes and safe the file.

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Or "sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst". Or "gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst". etc, along that line.

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Use

su -

the '-' gives you root's env as well.
Incidentally, on a lot of systems, menu.lst is just a symlink; the real file is /boot/grub/grub.conf

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