Unable to login as root from the login screen even though I have a root account

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 :)

Answer 2

Caveat: Don't do this unless you have a good reason

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.