Its like a mosquito that chases me around, LOL. It bites me in the neck, then goes away for a bit, and when I'm not looking again, it bites me in the leg. Its a little different each time. I did search for su authentication failure, but I think its just because nobody else typed in that error message. The next person looking will find this post.
I tried Ubuntu once and only lasted one day because it felt like I was doing work to make the computer happy instead of the computer working for me.
What I was doing (su from within a terminal session) did work for almost a week, and I don't understand why it stopped working, but I'm guessing you are saying it wasn't really supposed to work in the first place.
Now it appears I can get a root terminal session that can do a copy/paste only by opening a terminal session, then doing a
sudo roxterm
The normal admin terminal session on the menu being used here can't do a copy/paste even with clipit installed and that's why I'm using roxterm, so that I can copy and paste the screen output to avoid needing to rekey all the messages by hand.
Anyway, thanks for pointing me to that post. I'll mark this solved since I now have a root terminal session that can copy/paste. That was what I was trying to get...