How to enable 'root' in Leopard

Hello and welcome to Mackins. I'm Dan Loeb and here's my partner Alex Nickel. Today we're here to show you what is root and what can you do with root privileges. So, Alex?

Okay, well first of all the first trick is how to enable the root user. Now, this is something which you can do on a computer without any access to the computer, and it has to be a Macintosh computer. Right here, you see the log on screen. We have to click a username to log in; we're going to fix that.

You hold the power button for about five seconds to shut down the computer, and when it shuts down, the screen should go dark. Now we're going to turn on the computer like normal, except we're going to hold the apple key and we're going to hold the S key. So, let's turn it on and hold Apple S.

Now, you'll notice it looks like it's doing it normally at first, you know, the normal screen. But then, you're going to see some black and white stuff come up on the computer. So right here, and this is actually a terminal. And yeah, all you have to do is try on and hold Apple S in order to get to this terminal.

So now, once it comes up, you're going to wait like 10 seconds, then hit enter. Then what I want you to do is type mount, and John will put this on the screen for me: space dash eww space /. And now we're going to hit enter, and what that does is it makes us able to edit the file system and do stuff.

You might get an error thing with that or anything, but it will work. So now, what we want to type is passwd. Pas swd and hit enter. Now what you're going to do is type a password. It won't display while you're typing, and confirm it after you hit enter and type it again when it asks to confirm the password, and then hit n.

Now when you type passwd, it will come up and say new password. Type the password, hit enter, confirm the password, hit enter. And then what you want to do once you're done with that process is you type exit. E, ex IT.

Now, normally when you hit it, a little logout thing will come at the bottom of the screen and say logging out, and then the computer will boot up and you'll be back at the login screen. That doesn't happen, so type exit again and hit enter until it does.

So that didn't work for me the first time. I type exit again and hit enter. Now this time it's working, and you can see all this stuff is going to come up on the screen. In about 10 to 20 seconds, we'll have the logon screen up again.

So once the logon screen is up again, I'll show you what to do. So anyway, so now here is the logon screen. Let me dim the brightness a little so you can see it. And right here, you'll notice that there is something on the login screen called "Other." It's normally blue and black, but what you do is you click that and then you type the username as root or the name is root.

Then you click in the password field, and remember when we had all that black code up? You typed passwd and then type the password and confirm that password. The password to root is whatever we typed there—in my case, it's really long. So we're going to do another cut right here as I type this.

Okay, so now you should get the logging in thing, and then eventually a desktop will come up. You might not have a lot of files and folders on the desktop; in fact, it will be like a brand new account. Now on this root account, you will notice a few things that it's there.

Anyway, so, um, whatever you have to set to come up, will come up like that terminal that came up is just me. And you know, so normally it'll just be normal user, and you can do anything you want to on root. And you can go into system preferences and change another user's password and do whatever you want with the root user.

So yeah, that's how life is. Anyway, that's a huge security, so do it to whoever you want. Don't blame us, okay? It's not our fault. So um, yeah, that's it.

Okay, and so here we are with Mac heads. Thank you for watching! If you have any questions, um, just write in the comment box and move into. Thank you.