root password...[ubuntu 5.10 installation issues]

[neil woolford]

On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 13:18 -0500, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

> During the install of ubuntu 5.10, I _WAS_ asked for a non-root username
> and password. (which I always set to a generic user that I only use until
> I can manually configure what I want in /etc/skel And then manually
> create my regular user accounts with specific user ID's that remain the
> same on ALL of my linux file systems...)

That first user has administrator powers via the 'sudo' command.

> BUT it did _NOT_ ask me for a root password, nor did it ask me to take
> note of a default root password... thus I can't even su to root to
> make the configuration changes I need, in order to be able to stand
> ubuntu... such as force run level 3 booting and use startx to
> optionally fire up the gui etc... etc...

It might be worth going with the flow a bit on this.  Ubuntu has a
particular way of handling such issues which are more like (say) OSX.
The main point is that sudo is used in place of a root account.  Users
can easily be set up to have or not have sudo privileges.  Clever people
make this quite fine grained - I just let some users have all privileges
and others none.  This can of course be through the
System->Administration->Users and Groups gui thing, without having to
wrestle with the sudoers configuration file (hint - visudo will catch
your worst errors if you go this way!)

> 
> Is it normal for the installer to skip asking the user for the root
> password???

Totally!

> 
> Is there a default root password on the ubuntu 5.10 default install?

No.  There are ways to activate the account of course, but try to go
with the flow a bit first...  Have a look in the Ubuntu Wiki
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RootSudo is a good place to start.

Neil



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