I have installed 12.04 LTS but surprisingly not able to login as root. I have unlock and set the password for root but while login i can not see 'other' option in GUI login where i can put root id and password.
please help me.
I have installed 12.04 LTS but surprisingly not able to login as root. I have unlock and set the password for root but while login i can not see 'other' option in GUI login where i can put root id and password.
please help me.
I store my home directory in lvm and occasionally need to unmount it to perform maintenance. It's much more convenient to login as root in those circumstances, as I can look up documentation online and browse the web while waiting for fsck
.
By default, Ubuntu's greeter LightDM no longer supports logging in with an arbitrary username as it did in the past.
But this is still Linux, and we can configure this. Edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
with root privileges and add this line:
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-show-manual-login=true
Reboot, and you can now login as any user by username including root.
You can also try opening the terminal (ctrl + T) and entering the following:
sudo su
type your password, and you should then have root privileges. Hope this helps! :)
Note: Try sudo nautilus
also, so you can explore folders and file in the GUI.
This is not possible (without a lot of work manually overriding stuff) because it is pretty much always a bad idea.
In this question, there is a good discussion about the many things that can go wrong if you log in as root. Many things won't work at all. Other things won't work as expected. If you do anything wrong, you could destroy all the data on your computer. It makes your computer more vulnerable than windows to malicious attacks.
In all cases I've ever heard of, when a person is asking how to log in as root, they are trying to log in as root to accomplish something that could be better done without logging in as root.
As such, I recommend editing the question to ask how do best accomplish whatever you are actually trying to accomplish. We'd be happy to help you get to your goals :)
To do that you should try writing these on the terminal window (ctrl+T):
sudo su
passwd
For the first command you will probably have to type in your password. The second will set your root password to whatever you enter.
As far as I know you can't login as root at the GUI login screen and it would be a bad idea anyway. Juan's answer is correct - you can launch a terminal and sudo su
to root user (if you are in the sudoers group) and then launch a program which uses a GUI if you wish.
First:
To actually enable root logins, first you have to set a password for the root account, and then unlock the locked root account. If you don't set a password for the root account the passwd command will return
`passwd: Unlocking the password would result in a passwordless account`
So, first execute in a terminal
sudo passwd root
you will prompted for a new Unix password. Write it twice(second for confirmation).
Then execute
sudo passwd -u root
to unlock the account. This should return
passwd: password expiry information changed
Reverting back
If you want to disable root account in Ubuntu you need to lock the root account by using the following command sudo passwd -l root
Second:
Open the terminal:and type
gksudo gedit /etc/ect/lightdm/lightdm.config
(Orignal ) this it what it should already look like:
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=unity-greeter
user-session=unity
greeter-show-manual-login=true
greeter-show-manual-login=true
(What you need to replace the orignal with)
[SeatDefaults]
autologin-user=<YOUR USER>
autologin-user-timeout=0
user-session=ubuntu
greeter-session=unity-greeter
You will auto-log into root
Please follow the steps:
before doing any changes please take the backup:
mkdir bakup
cp /etc/gdm3/custom.conf backup/
cp /etc/pam.d/gdm-password backup/
sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
And add the following line in the [security]
directive and save the file.
[security]
AllowRoot=true
[xdmcp]
Then Save it
Now run sudo nano /etc/pam.d/gdm-password
file. And add the hash (#) sign to the start of the following line and save the file:
#auth required pam_succeed_if.so user !=root quiet_success
To apply these changes, we have to restart the system. After the restart, login from the root account again and verify that the root account is enabled.
$sudo -i
enter the password
su
startx
A new desktop screen with GUI root account will emerge. The previous desktop though still remains alive for use after you log off the root account. I feel that this way of accessing the root in GUI is better that creating a permanent GUI account of root.