root password problems

[champ_weller]

I am running ubuntu 11.04 on an hp pavilion 742n. When i installed ubuntu i only installed one user on so my password is the root password Well everytime i ran the sudo command it asked for the password and it worked perfectly well i go to make a directory in the /usr/games directory and my root password wont work at all now what do i do

[yancek]

How did you try to create the directory? Were you using a terminal to create a newdirectory like:

sudo mkdir /usr/games/newdirectory

If you used the terminal as above, was there any warning/error message?

or were you doing it from the file manager? No reason sudo would not work in the example above.

[champ_weller]

i did it exactly as you had it above in terminal and when i put my password in it didnt say anything but it did not make the directory but when i tried to make myself root with su and i put my password in i recieved the message "su: Authentication failure
"

[jayd512]

when i tried to make myself root with su and i put my password in i recieved the message "su: Authentication failure"

Does this error only occur when trying to use su to gain root access?(switch user accounts)
Or can you still use the sudo command?(super user do)

[enitink]

You can't use `su` to alivate yourself as root user in Ubuntu, by default root user is locked. You need to set it's password to login or use su to be as root.

[jayd512]

Right. Which is why I was asking if that was the issue.

[enitink]

it's not an issue, it's a normal behavior. When you after installing first time open the terminal, you can read something about it.

you can set login password for root using `$ sudo passwd root`,
after this you will be able to login as root and also use the su command.

[SeanGee]

it's not an issue, it's a normal behavior. When you after installing first time open the terminal, you can read something about it.

you can set login password for root using `$ sudo passwd root`,
after this you will be able to login as root and also use the su command.

Alternatively you could use 'sudo su'. I prefer not to create the root user but if I am doing something that requires me to be root for an extended period that's what I use.

[freesoftware]

My dear friend,
As you know there is no default root password for Ubuntu.But the installed user have the full privilege of root.We use the sudo command for getting the root power.So it is not necessary to set the root password.It is not recommended by Ubuntu to set it because of some valid security reasons.You can perform all the jobs that can be done by root with this simple sudo command at the very beginning of all terminal commands that require permission.In your case you can create the folder Games in the usr/games folder by just changing into the same folder through terminal by the cd command.And while inside that folder use the command

sudo mkdir folder_name

Now it will ask for your password(not the root password).Enter the password and you are done.

Note:-Only the installed user can use the sudo command unless other users are added by the installed user into the sudoers file.

[sdousley]

Alternatively you could use 'sudo su'. I prefer not to create the root user but if I am doing something that requires me to be root for an extended period that's what I use.

The other option is to use "sudo -i"