Q I am dual booting while in transition to Linux-only OSes on my machines, and I found Ubuntu to be the most complete and overall user-friendly distro; however, I do have minor problems. First, releases later than 6.0.6 have trouble using my laptop screen (I've had similar problems with many distros on my desktop since I switched to an LCD panel). But the main issue here is that I simply don't like using sudo and would like to modify the system another way so that it has root and normal users, only I can't find how to make the change.
A It's impossible to give any advice on your display hardware without more information, but it's surprising that an earlier distro works while a later version fails. It's usually the other way round, as support for more hardware is added with each release. Ubuntu 6.06 is almost three years old and is no longer supported. This means that you will not get new versions of software and, most importantly, there will be no security fixes. As vulnerabilities are discovered, your computer will become gradually more insecure and open to exploitation.
Getting a root login in a terminal is easy with Ubuntu - run 'sudo bash'
to run the shell as root. When you have finished either run log out or press Ctrl+D to log out back to your normal user session. While in the root shell, you could set a password for root so that you can use su in future. However, it would seem that you may be approaching this from the wrong direction. If you don't like one of the core features of how Ubuntu works, something that is part of the distro's philosophy, and it no longer supports your hardware, is it really the best distro for you?
Fedora 10 uses the Gnome desktop by default (like Ubuntu), has good hardware support, has a root account and received 10/10 in our recent review. I recommend that you try out this, or one of the many alternatives in order to keep your system up to date and working how you want.