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I upgraded to 11.10 yesterday.

My Nautilus started to crash on load, looks like a known bug with remote terminal plugin nautilus exiting with segmentation fault after upgrade.

So I decided to uninstall it, but that was the beginning of my nightmare - my root password is changed.

Yes, I type in the right password, but auth fails!

I don't know what to do, I can't auth as root, which means I can't install/uninstall packages.

umpirsky@umpirsky:~$ su
Password: 
su: Authentication failure

Any idea? Please help.

UPDATE: I removed default keyring, but problem resists.

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring
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umpirsky
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1 Answers1

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The root account is disabled by default. A safer way to perform super-user actions is using the sudo command followed by your command. Example : sudo apt-get install clementine.

But if you really want to borrow the super-user account for a while, use sudo su. You can set the root account password there with passwd command. Example:

##Enter your account's password here##
nits@nits-workstation:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for nits: 
root@nits-workstation:/home/nits# passwd
Enter new UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password: 
passwd: password updated successfully
root@nits-workstation:/home/nits# exit
exit

##once the password is set, log-in to the root account with the password you just set##
nits@nits-workstation:~$ su
Password: 
root@nits-workstation:/home/nits#
Nitin Venkatesh
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  • Thanks, that did the trick. Isn't this a security issue? I mean, everyone can change root pwd and take advantage of that. What is the point of this password then? – umpirsky Oct 14 '11 at 17:15
  • I had much shorter password before, and now passwd didn't let me enter that short pwd. Is this the password I enter when installing packages from software center, or updating the system? – umpirsky Oct 14 '11 at 17:17