Whenever you read entries about Fedora administration, the common recommendation is to use sudo instead of the root account.
But if you try sudo at the command line, you are met with some error regarding sudo configuration: Fedora does not sudo-enable your account to during system installation, so you are stuck.
What to do is simple:
su -
(insert your root password)
visudo <em> (as per kagesenshi comment #1)</em>
Find a line which says:
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
and add
$username ALL=(ALL) ALL
where $username is the user you log in. That’s all. Ubuntu default behaviour on Fedora.
A variant of this is adding a NOPASSWD tag to avoid requesting for a password every time, though I DO NOT RECOMMEND doing that (gives you time to think about what you are doing); the line becomes:
$username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
EDIT – Brian correctly suggests to uncomment the wheel group in /etc/sudoers and add the users to said group; while correct from a sysadmin point of view, I believe we should keep it simple for users that use Fedora “on the Desktop”. I strongly believe Using Fedora and Administering Fedora should be kept as separate activities as possible. Anyway, for more technically oriented users, you can find this way at the fedorasolved.org site.
Luca Botti at LinkedIn