Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a tool that lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment, including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications directly in Windows without setting up a virtual machine or dual-boot. You can run full Linux operating systems inside Windows easily. We have written many tutorials on installing different Linux distributions on Windows WSL. Now that you have Ubuntu installed with WSL, do you know how to log on as a root user? By default, after installing Ubuntu, you’ll be prompted to create a normal user account. This account will be added to the sudoers file which gives the account sudo permission. However, this is not the root. Now, I don’t think you should log in as root on a Linux machine. But there might be some cases where you’ll need to log in as root to perform some critical tasks. The day you need to log on as root, then the tutorial should come in handy.
Log on as root
As you can see, when you launch the Ubuntu WSL app, it logs directly into the normal user account. See the below screenshot. The first user after installing is the default account. Now, to start the Ubuntu WSL app and log in as root instead, use the steps below. First, close the Ubuntu console prompt for the normal user. Then open the Windows command prompt by clicking the start button and find Command Prompt or search for it as shown in the image below. When the command Prompt opens, type the commands below to configure the Ubuntu WSL app to log in as root instead of a normal user account. Ubuntu: Ubuntu 20.04: Ubuntu 18.04: After running the command above for the respective Ubuntu version, go and start up the Ubuntu WSL app and this time the root account should be logged in. You can see that the root account is logged in. Now do what you intend to do with the root account. When you’re done, exit. You need to log back in with the normal account. Simply relaunch Windows Comment Prompt and run the commands below replacing the root user with the normal account. Replace richard with your account. There you go. That should do it! Conclusion: This post showed you how to log on as root when using Ubuntu on WSL. If you find any error above, please use the comment form below to report.
