Quote Originally Posted by fr0g12 View Post
alright well thanks for trying to help, but its more than one app and i have had them on multiple distros before. Time to search the underground i suppose. And ill try the recovery mode next and if that fails ill just reload something else. Like i said Linux is a hobby and curiosity to me, its not terribly important that any particular distro works. I just wanted ubuntu to work.. Anyway thanks again
If you really want to use 'su' exactly like you would in, say, Fedora, it's easy enough to do - simply change the root password to a known value. You can do that from a terminal:

sudo passwd root
or using the Users and Groups applet under System->Administration. In either case, once you know what the root password is, you can use the 'su' command just as you would in any other distro.

Ubuntu obviously believes in the 'sudo' concept, but there are those who believe it to be a bad idea. In general, the argument goes that now you have two or more passwords (root and any sudoers) that have to be hard to guess, rather than just one. There is some logic to this argument, but I'm not sure it really makes that much difference one way or the other. Still, if all you're interested in is typing 2 characters for a root terminal rather than 7, just change the root password and you're there.

If you're concerned about security, after changing the root password and making absolutely sure 'su' works, you can remove your regular user accounts from the admin group, and no more sudo!

Mark