very basic about initial install

[Phil Sexton]

reader at newsguy.com wrote:

> Just a word of explanation for my bitching...
> I wanted to install gentoo in vmware on windows vista but after many
> attempts and google fishing... It never happened.
> 
> I switched to Ubuntu to see if it would install and boot... and presto
> ... it did on the first try  .. so nothing but kudos there.
> 
> Once I started trying to use the new install I began to see how
> crippled it was in terms of doing things the unix/linux way,
> established over decades of linux and unix use.  And use of numerous
> distribution over the years.
> 
> Some other distros also hide the command line but I've found there is
> usually some way provided to access it as root without running around
> chasing your tail.
> 
> Apparently `sudo' is that way with Ubuntu, but only if your network
> dns is able to `find' your machine.  Or at least that appears to be
> the failure message when I attempted to use sudo to access root on a
> recent desktop install of ubuntu inside a vmware on MS vista.
> 
> It seems like really poor design to have complicated and possibly no
> access to a root terminal.  Why not just establish a root passwd
> during install....? I can't imagine why designers would have opted to
> make that difficult.
> 
> I'm not trying the server install.

I don't think it is that difficult.  I just do:
sudo passwd
and set a root password, then I have access to virtual terminals and 
root access in x terminals.

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