One of my main frustrations with Ubuntu has always been the lack of a usable root account.

As a result, I've taken to enabling the account on all of my boxes.

All you have to do is assign a password to the account:

Code:

and if you decide to disable the account later:

Code:

If you do add a password to root, don't mess with the sudoers file, as if you disable root in the sudoers file and later disable the account itself, you won't be able to do anything and will have to use a livecd to fix it.