Linux Fundamentals, 2nd Edition

Working with Root Access

Linux systems control access to files, directories, and applications by using user accounts. Linux has three types of user accounts:

• Root—the administrator account with full privileges to all files, directories, and services

• Standard—normal user accounts

• Service—application accounts

Because of its power, the root user account can be somewhat dangerous to have active on your Linux system. By default, the Ubuntu distribution blocks the ability to log in or change to the root user account to help manage the security environment. However, that’s not the case in Red Hat-based distributions.

If you check in a Red Hat environment, the root user account exists:

and should have been assigned a password at the time of installation: ...