what is root actually means?

[Nils Kassube]

dicky s wrote:
> again,its dicky..coming for asking.. these questions
> maybe so ridiculous for you all,a piece of cake for
> experienced users,i guess. the question is : what is
> root?a kind of user? how to log in as root? it seems
> like root have full access and permission to the whole
> system. i am the only user in my kubuntu 7.04, but i
> am not automatically log in as root.. i have no idea
> about these these things.. it has been 2 weeks with
> linux, trying to get closer with it, and i will not
> give up friends..haha..

It is called root because it is the root of all evil :)

Actually, for all (?) Unix-like systems, including Linux, root is the 
superuser with permission to do evrything. As this can be very dangerous, 
if you don't know what you are doing, you should not login as root 
without good reason. On Ubuntu systems the login as root is disabled by 
default for security reasons. If you really need to login as root use the 
command

sudo su

in a terminal.

Here is some more detailed information:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo


Nils