What is root?

Root is the name of the most powerful account on a Debian installation. The root user account can do everything on the machine. Root is also known as supervisor and administrator. Root's home (~) folder is /root.

root has uid1 0 and gid2 0.

Password

At installation time, you are asked whether you want to use the root account or not.

How to use root level access as a normal user.

  1. uid is user identifier, a number which identifies all user accounts (1)

  2. gid is group identifier (2)