On 11/1/25 6:35 PM, Stephen Morris wrote:
On 2 Nov 2025 at 11:39, Stephen Morris wrote:
Date sent: Sun, 2 Nov 2025 11:39:30 +1100
Subject: RE: Issue with Fedora 43 difference with gedit and geany with
root
user.
To: [email protected]
From: Stephen Morris<[email protected]>
Send reply to: Community support for Fedora
users<[email protected]>
On 11/1/25 5:25 PM, Stephen Morris wrote:
On 11/01/2025 05:56 PM, Stephen Morris wrote:
Hi Samuel, just for info and I don't know if this is just my environment,
if I issue sudo -i it prompts for my password, which when supplied it
switches to root as expected. If I issue su - it prompts for a password
and if I supply my password it gets an authentication failure, which I
assume is because it wants a root user which by default Fedora doesn't
create.
So use sudo -i and while you're root, run passwd to set a root
password.
Thanks Joe, I hadn't understood that feature, but unless my
environment was defective, I thought that fedora didn't even create the
root user as a user that could be logged in with if you wanted to.
There's always a root user. That's what sudo and su are doing,
switching you to that user. sudo just does it with an suid executable so
that root doesn't need to have a password.
I was referring to the situation where in the past (I don't remember what
the requirement was) I had a situation where I needed to login with the
root user and I couldn't do it because the root user didn't exist, and I had
to do a net search to find instructions on how to create the root user so
that I could login with it.
regards,
Replied to another message just a while ago.
I run with XFCE.
I generally have terminal window that I run su on, so I can just
switch to it to run things that need root access.
Rather than having to do sudo every time.
On my machine with Fedora 43, my user can't run dnf without user
the sudo. while the root user works fine. Machine was a clean
install of Fedora 42, and then dnf upgrade. root user did already
exist, but did have to user sudo to change the password, since I
didn't have any ideal what it was after the install? Assumed it
would be my user, but wouldn't take it. After changing password
with sudo it worked fine with su.
Hi Michael, what Samuel is saying is that by default a root user account
already exists but it has been created without a password, so if you get
into a situation where the password for that root user is required you
won't be able to supply it because it doesn't exist, so that user is
unusable until, as you did, you actually set a password on that user.
The issue I was referring to was instead of logging in with my normal
userid I needed to log in with the root user which didn't exist and I
found instructions on how to create it, but I then had people tell me
that it was recommended to never create the root user and I should get
rid of it, which I did.
You can't not create it and you can't get rid of it. It always exists
and it always has to exist. It just might not have a password set,
which is different from an empty password. If there's no password set,
then you can't login to it directly, you need to use "sudo". "su" won't
work either because that would require the root password which doesn't
exist.
--
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