Linux Mint Forums

So... when I installed the system (Mint 14 Cinnamon), I set my user password as per normal.

I logged in, did various things, used 'su' to edit some config files as root, and had to supply my password to do so.

Then I decided to change my user password, using the User Accounts interface. Logged out, logged back in with the new password, no problems...

...that is, until I tried to use 'su' to edit some config files again. Wouldn't take my password for the root user. It would, however, take my old password. Odd... and the same thing for 'sudo' - won't work with my current password, only with the old one.

Shouldn't those be sync'd up, being as I am the owner/adminstrator/only-friggin'-user on this machine? Am I expecting too much for the GUI to do that when the password is changed on an administrator account?

Hello, memilanuk.

During the installation Linux Mint will silently assign the password that you specify to 2 independent users: to your own account and to user root.
Whenever you change your own account password, the root password is totally unaffected by this step.

You can, however, proceed like this in order to synchronize them manually:
After you have changed your own password, you open a terminal window and execute sudo will expect you to type in your own password. Once this has been done, you will have a root terminal session. Inside this session you change the root password by executing and typing the same new password that you have chosen for your own acount.

As you can have more than one user who is granted the privilege of acting as "root" - It all depends on what you configure in your sudoers file. - automatically synchronizing root's password with another user is not really feasible. Assuming you have added 2 users to the sudoers group that are allowed to run root commands which of the 2 passwords should be assigned to root automatically?

Kind regards,
Karl

Got it, thanks!