Comment 67 for bug 32906

Pasi wrote on 2008-04-26: (permalink)

I find this very serious problem since ubuntu relies so heavily on sudo (the lack of root account) and if that command fails there is no way to do anything. sudo should not depend on network configurations. It sounds very very dangerous!
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What do you mean, "lack of a root account"? I go to my terminal, do

xxx@xxx:$ su root

, enter my password for the first ("admin") user created in the Ubuntu setup, and I immediately get a command line

root@xxx:$

Just for kicks, I went into the User Management dialog and changed my root password to something other than my non-root password.

And then, I go to the graphical log-in screen, type in "root" for username and my root password for password, and tada! I'm logged in to a full graphical Ubuntu session as root user. Just because the root user isn't easily visible doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Indeed, I find it hard to figure out how ANY *X system could function without an account with root priveleges, if only for booting purposes.

Just saying, it's not like Ubuntu is any more dependent on sudo than any other *X system.