Superuser Authentication Failure

Did you use the password to login as jebedee or as root?

Normally, Ubuntu disables the root account and encourages you to use sudo (and your users password) for actions that need root rights. If you need a full root shell, you can use 'sudo -i'.

For su to work, you first have to create a password specificaly for root using 'sudo passwd'.

HTH

Thanks for the heads-up, Jan. I just finished re-reading RootSudo in the Wiki and (Bonk!) now I know what it's talking about. My adventure involves installing the latest Opera (my favorite!) web browser and the Opera docs specified the SU command. I'll try it again when I get home, but I'll use SUDO instead. I appreciate your good advice, Jan.

If you want to use 'su' instead of sudo to gain root privileges, you must:

1) assign a password to root: 'sudo passwd root'
2) setuid /bin/su: 'chmod 4750 /bin/su'

root@xxx# ls -la /bin/su
-rwsr-x--- 1 root admin 32796 2006-12-19 21:35 /bin/su

Now you have enabled the root account and you can 'su' from every user belonging to admin group.

Yes, I know that 'sudo' may be more secure, but there are some situations in which it's more useful to 'su' than to 'sudo'.

mciancio thanks!!
it helped a lot i was using fedora before now kubuntu!

mciancio thanks!!
it helped a lot i was using fedora before now kubuntu!

hii

Hi everybody, last time i starte in terminal my Ubuntu 8.10. But when i try tu ge su acces, i got a problem like this:
joel@joel-laptop:~$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
joel@joel-laptop:~$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
joel@joel-laptop:~$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
joel@joel-laptop:~$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
joel@joel-laptop:~$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
joel@joel-laptop:~$ sudo password root
[sudo] password for joel:
sudo: password: command not found
Can somebody tell me abou this case(I am newbie in linux)

assign a password to root: 'sudo passwd root'