Changing from user to superuser
Solution 1:
Launch an instance of your terminal (press CTRL+ALT+T or search for "terminal" in the Dash). This will give you your normal shell from which you can run commands or programmes without root access.
To get root access, you can use one of a variety of methods:
Run
sudo <command>and type in your login password, if prompted, to run only that instance of the command as root. Next time you run another or the same command without thesudoprefix, you will not have root access.Run
sudo -i. This will give you an interactive root shell. Note that the$at the end of your prompt has changed to a#, indicating that you have root access. But you fall in the root home directory (/root/). From here you can run any sequence of commands as root, or run the commandexitto leave the root shell.Use the
su(substitute user) command to get a root shell. This is effectively the same as usingsudo -i. Note that when you use this command it will ask for the root password and not your login password. These are not the same. You may have to set or change the root password by runningsudo passwd rootfirst.Run
sudo -s. This gives you root access, but maintains your current SHELL. Shell specific settings, including your current directory, are preserved. For instance if you usebash(Ubuntu's default shell), aliases (and any other settings from~/.bashrc) are kept when you switch to the root user. To leave the root access, typeexitas in the cases above.
Be advised that playing around with root access is dangerous, and if you had to ask about root access, you probably shouldn't have the privilege. You have the potential to completely ruin your entire system with the mis-execution of many commands. Be careful and verify what you are doing before you do it. Google is Search engines are your friends.
Solution 2:
This is my way.
Open a terminal an run this command:
sudo su -
The command starts a login shell and you will find yourself in root's home directory with root's environment.