On Mar 2, 2012, at 10:26 AM, Kevin Wright wrote:
On Feb 29, 2012, at 9:18 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:

On Feb 29, 2012, at 7:08 AM, Nikos Roussos wrote:

Why not add by default the first user created (right after installation finishes) to administrative group and disable the root account? 


This is, is fact, how Apple has done things circa 1999 with Mac OS X. You can 'su' to root, you can also 'sudo' but you can't literally login as root either in text console or GUI, the account is disabled. And the first user is an 'admin' by default.



Hi Chris,

I'm not sure what you mean but "you can't literally login as root either in the text console..." 

This is confusing to me since I've been using the root account on Mac OS X since 2001. I was working for Apple as a build engineer and all of our builds were performed using the root account. 

Here's an article that explains how to enable the root account:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528


I'm not sure why you're confused. The account is disabled, and until it's enabled you can't login as root, either using ssh, or entering ">" at the loginwindow to get to a text console and trying to login as root there. Once the root account is enabled you can.

Chris Murphy