Root permissions or logon

Question

I know this sounds naive but, why can't I log on as root or give my ID root permissions? Why do I have to use Terminal?

I mounted a drive and now want to give permissions to other PC on my network to access the drive.

Answer 1

By default, the Root account password is locked in Ubuntu. This means that you cannot login as Root directly or use the su command to become the Root user. However, since the Root account physically exists it is still possible to run programs with root-level privileges. This is where sudo comes in - it allows authorized users (normally "Administrative" users) to run certain programs as Root without having to know the root password.

Scraped from Ubuntu Documentation

Answer 2

If you want to give others access to the drive, you can use the chmod command along with the -R parameter to invoke the command recursively. Here's an example:

sudo chmod -R 666 /media/username/drivename

To change ownership, you can use the chown command:

sudo chown username:username /media/username/drivename

Change "username" to your username and "drivename" to the actual label of the device in your filesystem.

See: file permissions.