The youngsters were a couple of engineers leaving for Silicon Valley in a day or two, so I didn't have a lot of time to figure out Ubuntu. I use the command "su" for xterm root use, and couldn't get root access in any way. I looked on the internet how to edit /etc/fstab with Ubuntu. Just a different system. I can configure SuSE users to have root priviledge. YAST is a very handy tool. In KDE, you can open the file browser as root login, and editors or terminals then open as root. It was disappointing to frustrate those engineers trying to start linux with Ubuntu. Certainly just personal experience. But I would rather spend my time using linux for programming or learning stuff than trying to get it to work. It is worth a look to see how much is available in opensuse. Robert Nesius wrote: > On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Rick Engebretson<eng at pinenet.com> wrote: > >> >> >> Some youngsters I know thought they were getting into linux with Ubuntu, >> and when they needed to fix something we couldn't even log in as root. >> >> > By design. Logging in directly as root is disabled on most modern distros > these days. The BKM is to configure a local user with sudo access. > > Unless you were implying you couldn't even use sudo? > > -Rob >