Creating a Root Password in Linux

I am used to gaining elevated privileges in Linux by adding sudo to a command e.g.

sudo apt-get update

I wanted to stay in elevated privileges so I went to login as root and realised that my normal Linux account didn’t have root privileges.

I did some searching on the Internet and found that most versions of Linux disable the root account by default.

I found that you can enable root by running the following command.

sudo passwd root

This will ask you to add a password to the root account and once you do this you should be good to go.

Type su at the command prompt to become the root user. You could also add root when you log in to run with elevated privileges.

Note: This is something you should use sparingly and you should only use elevated privileges when you really need to.

I have tested this in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Ubuntu and on my Linux Mint installation.