set up a root password

[Robert Costa]

For what I understood, Ubuntu is pointed at users who do not have
knowledge about how a system's security can be improved. Users that
are happy to have a system running, more or less as they want to,
because they know not much more than how to start a webbrowser, email-
or instant messaging client - maybe some office software. Unluckyly,
sometimes it is neccessary to do a little administrative work. Those
users don't want to remember a second password, as they won't remember
it. Probably most of them entered their user name or their companion's
name as a password anyway.

Still, we wan't to have a system which is more secure than some
software monopolist's one, plus it should be more usable too. So using
sudo and disabling the root access is just a compromise between how
the average, unexperienced user can do a little administrative work
without being shocked before even typing the first command, and a
secure system.

If somebody's a geek, it shouldn't be such a big of a problem to
re-enable root-user and work with Ubuntu just as if it was a pure
Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, SuSE, Fedora or whatever kind of distribution,
while hacking commands into some text console. Ubuntu is for everyone.
Not just for geeks.

But that's just my opinion about that root-account-discussion. :-)

Cya,
Robert.