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.

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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 :)

Solution 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.

Comments

[FRD]

@JorgeCastro, he's trying access root using the login interface.

[vishal]

See askubuntu.com/q/16178/6161 about why this is a REALLY bad idea.

[Tapas]

i want to login as root in GUI.

[Tapas]

not this option.. i want to login as root

[Tapas]

this option was available till 11.10..is it not available in 12.04?

[Tapas]

thanks...well while installation i created 3 partition /,/home,/swap...now after installation i can not see /home...i can see home folder under / but cant see /home drive or directory.

[vishal]

@Tapas If you have just recently installed, the easiest way to fix this would be to simply install from scratch. However, if you do already have files you want to save, boot from the CD (or DVD or flash drive) you used for the installation. From there, you should be able to fix whatever is broken. (If you need more help fixing the partition, I'd recommend putting in a new question - I don't know enough to help with that)

[in8sworld]

I used 11.10 for a long time and never realized that was possible. I see from this site: [blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/05/… that it was. I really don't want to test that on my current system it seems like a terrible security risk.

[Adam Lassek]

Not everyone who wants to do this is a noob. My /home is located on an lvm partition, and when I unmount it to do maintenance I would login as root so I could use tabbed terminals, and pull up documentation in a browser.

[Shubham Sharma]

that solved my issue

[Erik Bennett]

I'm so glad you answered. I've been using a uid under 1000 since before Linux was written, and this was just what I needed. To those who declined to answer the question and said instead, "use su", I say, "not helpful".