In Unix/Linux the root account is the account which has absolute control over everything, a more detailed description of it can be found at wikipedia. By default you can access root priviledges by prefixing the command you wish to execute with “sudo“. This will allow you to perform the command you wish by then entering the password for the account you setup when installing Ubuntu. A problem with this is that it uses the same password as your user account, therefore potentially decreasing the level of security. An alternative to the “sudo” command is “su“, although you cannot use this command by default. To overcome this you need to change the root user’s password by using the following command:

sudo passwd root

This will then prompt for you to enter the password which you wish to use, although nothing appears on the screen please remember that it is still being inputted. Below is a screeenshot of what will appear on screen.

Activating the root account now gives you three options for performing “root”/administrative tasks.

1. To continue using the “sudo” command, this is probably the most secure, as this will give you root priviledges just for the command which it is followed by.
2. The “su” command will make you root user by providing a password, so all actions will be performed as the root user, this is less secure since a simple typo could potentially destroy the whole server, although you can revert back to your standard user priviledges simply by using the “exit” command.
3. You can log in as the root user, using the username root and password which you just set. This is definately the least secure, since every command that you run has full priviledges to access any part of the computer, although it is significantly more convenient if you know what you are doing.

Now that you have the ability to root access in the server, you are able to have much more control and are able to install and modify software & settings.