Notes on upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10

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"wanted my password when I rebooted. Does this mean I am logged on as super? Regular login is not supposed to have a password. If I was super, that would be cool, then I wouldn't have to type sudo before every command I issue in the terminal window."

I am not sure where you got the idea that regular (non-root) login should not have a password, but it does by default on Ubuntu and also on almost all, if not all, other GNU/Linux distributions. But you can set things up so that you are automatically logged on. If you need help doing that, please feel free to post a question about that.

The password you enter to perform administrative tasks is not root's password (i.e., is *not* the superuser's password). It is the password for your non-root user account. Your account is an administrative account, which means that it can perform actions *as* root (by multiple mechanisms, primarily sudo and PolicyKit), but it is *not* root. On an Ubuntu system, the root account is disabled. It is strongly recommended to keep it this way. Please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo for details.

"If I was super, that would be cool, then I wouldn't have to type sudo before every command I issue in the terminal window."

You don't have to type sudo before every command you run in the Terminal -- just before commands you want ran as root. Even when performing administrative tasks, a number of commands, like cd and ls, do not usually need to be run as root, and should not be (it is good practice only to run things as root when necessary).

However, it comes to mind that you might prefer to configure things so that you don't need to enter your password to run commands as root with sudo (and so that graphical sudo frontends, such as gksu, also don't require you to enter your password). Before doing this, you should be aware of the disadvantages:

(1) You are more likely to accidentally perform an action as root that you didn't intend to, especially graphically, where you do not actually have to type "sudo" to perform an administrative action.

(2) Someone else using your machine is more likely to accidentally or intentionally perform an administrative action that you do not want.

If you are willing to accept this elevated risk, then you can edit your sudoers file with visudo (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sudoers) and change the line that says

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

so that it instead says:

%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

By the way, as detailed in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo, if you want to simulate a root shell (where the shell and also everything you run in it will run by default as root), you can do that with "sudo -i" or (if you don't want root's environment variables) "sudo -s".

It occurs to me to ask -- did you have Ubuntu 11.04 set up so that you were automatically logged in when you booted up? If so, then for Ubuntu 11.10 not to be configured that way after upgrade would probably be considered a bug. Have you searched to see if a bug has been reported for this? While this bug could actually be fixed even though Ubuntu 11.10 has been released -- since it affects upgrading rather than installing from the CD -- I am not sure whether or not it would be considered to qualify for an SRU (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates).

I'd guess that the reason for this behavior is that automatic graphical login is a function of the display manager, and Ubuntu 11.04 uses GDM as the default display manager, whereas Ubuntu 11.10 uses LightDM as the default display manager. So if this is a bug, I suppose it is a bug in LightDM (as the fix would be for LightDM to automatically import settings from GDM).

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