I don’t recall where I  came across this information but passing it along should others need it or for myself to refer back to. I had tried in the past to us the Linux su command to login as a super user but it never worked. I think there are barriers built into to prevent this action.

What you can do to get around that behavior is to use the sudo command.

$sudo su

This will provide you access to the superuser without having to type in sudo every time if you have a number of commands.