How to login as Root In ubuntu

I would recommend trying it through command line.

First, open up terminal. Then enter this command sudo su and press enter. It will prompt for your password. After entering the password, everything that you are doing WITHIN THE TERMINAL is being done as you as root. I emphasized that to show that anything you do outside of the terminal will NOT be root.

So, to edit the motd, type this into terminal: gedit /etc/motd and edit your file accordingly.