How to Enable Root Login?

[LaneLester]

I'm probably being paranoid, but I can hear Ubuntu developers saying,"OK, those people who want convenient control of their systems have figured out how to log in as root. With this new release, how can we change things around so their method will no longer work?

Well, I'm one of those who, for many years, has been running as root. The devs really have me stumped with Kubuntu 14.04. The lightdm.conf file, that should be the place to look, isn't even a conf file any longer. Now it's a script!

Do you know how to log on as root, and are you willing to share it with me?

I should say I've been running Kubuntu 12.04 with satisfaction, so I guess I could stick with it.

Lane

[Snowhog]

See RootSudo

Click on Enabling the root account

[loonix]

I went back to kdm, and voilà, there's my root account. However, I found that the inconvenience I'd put up with for a couple weeks with LightDM forbidding root login, was actually a blessing. It helped me tighten my security ; I have changed the "run as" options for many of my launchers to allow root access while I am logged in as an administrative user. After typing my password about a half dozen times each session, I am off and running (safely).

[oshunluvr]

Just for info: I don't know why the Kubuntu devs decided to cripple lightdm further than it already is by removing the true config options and remarks from the conf file in 13.10, then in 14.04 it's totally different with all the configs split and moved to /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/. It used to be you could enable root login with lightdm by setting a root account password and then

sudo echo 'greeter-show-manual-login=true' >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf


reboot and you are done. I assume this would still work, but I could only guess which file should have the above option it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I do not advocate logging in as root into a GUI environment, but it's your machine.

[kubicle]

sudo echo 'greeter-show-manual-login=true' >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

You can't redirect sudo output like that (redirection is a shell function and the shell is still running as user...you'll get a "permission denied" error).
One way to do what you're suggesting is to pipe to tee:

echo "greeter-show-manual-login=true" | sudo tee -a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

[oshunluvr]

Sorry, you're correct of course. I actually used it after sudo -i so it would have been:

# echo 'greeter-show-manual-login=true' >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

I wasn't thinking about the command format, just the topic.