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I am running VirtualBox on a Windows Machine, and installed Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS. During the install, I set up the initial user. However, there appears to be no way to make this user have admin (sudo) privileges. After the install, I can login as the user, but I can't do anything involving admin (meaning, I can't use sudo). If there is a root password, I don't know what it is. (I think by default there is no password for root.)

I tried doing the trick where you run in recovery mode to run as root...but even then it prompts me for a root password, so I can't do anything.

I did the entire install process a second time, thinking I missed something, but to no avail.

Any advice on how to determine what the root password is when you install using VirtualBox? Or how to create a user that ends up in sudoers?

Ryan Bruner
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1 Answers1

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So, I found a colleague who suggested I try to login using "su root" and then enter the password for the first user created (which was NOT root). Sure enough, it worked!

This appears to be a bug? The default root user shouldn't have been created with a password, and the first user I created (which wasn't named "root") should have been given the option to be given admin access.

I'm not sure if this is an Ubuntu install issue, or a VirtualBox 7 issue.

Ryan Bruner
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