Technology Facts

In  UNIX & Linux, there is a superuser account named root. This is equivalent of Administrator in Windows. The superuser  has privileges to do anything and everything, and thus  using this superuser status to do daily can be dangerous. As root you could type a command incorrectly and destroy the system e.g rm -f  * .  Because of this reason it is better to do day to day work, as a normal user with limited privileges and use a special command sudo to run the task which require superuser privileges.

While installing Ubuntu, the installation program doesn't ask for the root account and by default the root account password is locked. Due to this reason you can not login as root directly or use the substitute user su command. However it is possible to run the tasks that require superuser privileges with sudo command as the the root account still exists physically. This allows normal user to run the certain tasks that require root privileges without knowing the root password. Sudo commands also needs a password which is your normal user account password and not the root password.

But some  system administrators  feel  that they should always have a proper access to the super user account. They feel uncomfortable if they do not have proper access to the root account.

You can enable the root account password by using sudo. All one needs to do is to log on to Ubuntu as normal user and give the following command,

sudo passwd

At first you will be asked for your normal user password and then the new password for the root account. After typing the new root account password your root account password gets activated. Now with this new root account password you can directly log on to Ubuntu as a root user and become a superuser.