What's the ROOT password on Ubuntu 10.10?
 

I can't believe this - it's not letting me in as root!

looooool. The root password is set to something random on Ubuntu. You can set it to something, buy doing sudo su, then passwd.

Hi,

The password of the account given while you install Ubuntu is the password for root account. You can switch as root user by using the following command.

Type sudo passwd root
enter your password of username with which you logged in.
Now select a new root password.

By default, the root account is locked in Ubuntu.

It is recommended to use "sudo" instead (and the password is the same as your user login password).

For example instead of:

The "Ubuntu way" is:

For more info: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

I know, its terrible, right?
"sudo -i" will also work. and I know for a fact that there are settings that you can change to allow graphical root logins, however, i dont remember how to do it exactly. Make sure you set your root password with "sudo passwd root" if you want to do that.

sudo passwd to change root's password.

sudo any command to run as root.

As snowpine say's. sudo is the ubuntu way.

Hmm... I've observed that Red Hat based distros; Centos, Mandriva, etc use "SU" and have a separate root account with password, as does Solaris, Aix, HP-UX and other Unix flavours.
Debian distros; Ubuntu, Mint, etc, use "sudo" where you have to confirm the sudo command with your own (user) password.

My :twocents:

Play Bonny! :hattip:

But Debian itself uses su!

Ubuntu also has su, but ubuntu claims that sudo is more secure (since users never log in as root), however, i prefer to have full control over my machine, if I want to protect my machine against my own stupidity, I will do that on my own, I don't want my OS to tell me that I can't do things.

Here's some more interesting info:
You can control which users can use sudo (and how easy it is for them)
this configuration is located in the /etc/sudoers file. To edit that file, use the command visudo
I like to set my sudoers file up so that all users can use sudo without needing password. (everybody knows their own password, so whats the difference?) It just makes things easier for me, and not any less secure in practice.

The point of sudo is that the admin can control what commands the user can run as root, and which users are trusted to.

Since you can do a lot of damage as root, sudo asks you for your password again to be sure it's you typing the command, not someone else (that the admin might not trust) that is sitting in front of your terminal.

I can also do a lot of damage with a big hammer, and that never requires a password. I understand why sudo exists, and what its meant to do, but there's just no reason to be that paranoid.

I'm not saying you should be that paranoid, I'm just explaining the reason why sudo was designed that way.

sudo and su are different tools for doing about the same thing. But there are differences. See the man page for each for details. Roughly, sudo is a more advance version of the legacy su command. The primary thing sudo adds is the ability to allow specific users the right to do specific commands. With su, you need to know the target user password. With sudo, you need to know your own password and have the configured right to do what you want to do.

If you can't figure out how to use these and other tools like the passwd command to enable the ability to log straight in as root, you probably shouldn't be logged in as root.

I understand. I totally understand what they were thinking when they designed sudo, its great for super-multi-user systems where most of the users do not own the machine and the machine has super mission critical files that would destroy an entire company if they were lost, and where there is also a risk of corporate espionage. However, on a typical home computer, you simply don't need that level of security, its over-engineered, like so many other parts of GNU/Linux.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Linux, Linux my primary OS, its the best thing out there right now. It's just not perfect.