Comment 2 for bug 121321

Thanks, Kees, for your answer.

In fact on my system

sudo grep root /etc/shadow

gives

root::...

(No '!'). My mistake was the following. There was one application that asked for a root password for installation. I did this
temporarily and used "passwd -d" for deletion. Now I learnt that one should call "passwd -l" (minus ell) for doing this. Mea
culpa: the Ubuntus documentation says so somewhere.

Consider the problem solved.

Regards,
Jens