What is root password?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I installed Ubuntu MATE 15.04 in a virtual machine under VBox 5.0.6 on OS X 10.11.

I am having trouble accessing shares, as I do not have permission. The shared folder is owned by root and group vboxsf.

I tried adding my user to the group vboxsf without success using usermod. (I can’t find a command to add a logged in user to a group).

I also tried Manage Groups from the System Administration menu, but this will not accept my password, There is AFAIK no root password, only the password I used to create the one and only user.

EDIT ____________
I set the root password (as suggested below) and fixed the issue.

The real problem seems to be that the one and only user was created with custom permissions, rather than being an administrator. I fixed this as root.

#2

Never done it myself, but I think this is approximately what you may need to do. That is to say, the root account should be there by default and so if you log into your system in the way described, you should be able to re-set the root password like you would re-set the password for any other user:

#3

I think there’s no root password and because of that you cannot login as root

On my system I needed to do some things I saw in a tutorial about root user

This command worked for me

sudo passwd

With this you create a password for root and then you can login
I think I took it from somewhere on askubuntu

#4

Ubuntu disables the root user by default and encourages the use of sudo to perform administrative operations.

However, you can enable the root account by giving it a password -

sudo passwd

For details, have a look at the Where is root? section of the User Management guide.

1 Like
#6

Have a read here

#7

Technically speaking, at least where 16 LTS is concerned. I was required to use:
sudo passwd root
in order to create a root password / enable root.
HTH :slight_smile:

–Chris

#8

My 16.10 would not recognize my password upon a reboot so I followed the tutorial linked up top and it worked like a charm. Saved my bacon! Thanks!!!