Error activating XKB configuration (Ubuntu 9.10)?

Question

I'm absolutely new on Ubuntu.
I was gonna learn Ubuntu, so I installed VMware 7.0.1 build-227600 on my Win7 x64, afterward I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it as a Virtual Machine.

I just enabled root account, and when I log in as root for once, I received the following error :

What's wrong with it?
Am I miss something?

Answer 1

First, you should not log in to the graphical environment as root. Could you log in as a normal user? Ubuntu doesn't support logging in as root.

Second, there is a good reason why the root account is disabled in Ubuntu. It is designed so that users that are members of the 'admin' group (e.g. the one user the installer creates) can gain root access with the sudo command. While not recommended, you can enable the root account, and log in to a shell as root, but not to graphical environment. It is good practise to use sudo when you need root access (or gksudo for graphical applications). If you need a root shell to execute several commands as root, you can just open a shell with sudo, for example:

sudo su -

But it is better to simply use sudo for the command you need if you only want to execute a few commands.

Look here for more details: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Answer 2

There are a lot of bug reports about this problem. Basically, it all comes down to not logging on to Ubuntu as root, which is a huge security risk, and not advisable at all. I highly suggest you follow petersohn's advice.