Re: password

[Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 07:56:56PM -0400, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> I understand that debian 11 does not establish a root password during
> installation, regardless of what the installer says.

This is not correct.

> To get a root
> password, I need to add
> rw init=/bin/bash
> to the grub start up script or
> ro init=/bin/bash
> to end of the kernel line

That's not correct either.

During the Debian (NOT LIVE!!) installation, you will be prompted for
the root password.  You will also be told that you may leave this
password empty, and that if you do so, the sudo package will be installed,
and your initial user account will be added to the sudo group, granting
unlimited sudo access.

Therefore, in a Debian (NOT LIVE!!) installation, there are two
possibilities:

1) The root account has a password, and you can use this to login directly
   as root ON A TEXT CONSOLE (not necessarily in a GUI), or to switch to
   root with the su command.

2) Your initial user account -- the one you set up during installation --
   will be able to ascend to root privileges with the sudo command.

In the second case, if you wish to give root a usable password, all you
have to do is run:

sudo passwd root