Su

This command is run in the standard Linux environment via the Terminal Activity. The GUI will probably not integrate comfortably with the XO Laptop's Sugar environment. Your user experience may vary considerably depending on the established environment and the other programs running on the laptop, may need re-installation after an OS Update. See the Linux software category for other commands.

This page is about using the su command in the Terminal.

WARNING you can erase all the data on your OLPC by using the su command, so be careful.

On newer builds of the OLPC software, the superuser account is disabled by default.

To set the password for su

• Enter the terminal and type

sudo passwd

• You will be prompted to enter a new password for the superuser. Type one in, then press enter.
• Re-enter your password when prompted.
• If the two passwords were identical, you will see the message:

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

You should now be able to enter superuser mode by typing

su -

and entering your new password.

See Also

• sudo The sudo command
• su -l one way to become the root user