[newbie] Cannot login as root (not a passwd issue)

[Fernando Cacciola <fernando_cacciola@hotmail.com>]

Hi people,

I'm new to debian (knoppix 3.8.1 on HDD) and to linux in general.
I installed it on HD without troubles (well, only after I realized that
my dev/hda1 was mounted from startup becasue I have too little RAM and a
swapfile was being automatically created, so I had to boot at runlevel 3
to skip KDE)
So far everything works like a charm, except for one thing, the system
is configured to disallow root login...
I know that suing is inherently more secure but for some tasks I rather
login straight as root.
I modified the file apt.d/login (or something like that), commenting out
the entry whose remark said it prevented root logins, but no luck.
Also, I'm sure I got to "sudo" on a couple of occasions, but now I get
an error that I'm not on the suders list (or so)...

Any ideas?

P.S: The bootlog indicates a number of varying failures which may or
maynot be important.. the system seems to work well AFAICT but I haven't
yet tried, say, printing, etc... should I post to log here to let you
folks analyze it, or should I just ingore it until I can make any sense
out of it?

P.S.: To what debian does knoopix 3.8.1 installed on hd corresponds to?

TIA

Fernando Cacciola