Thanks, fiferboy.

My ignorance at this point is embarrassing, but I must plow on.

You said:
As I type this, I'm using Firefox withing the Xubuntu VM. I opened a terminal window. I want to "be" root there. ( I happen to be in the /root directory at this point; I know that is irrelevant)

Most of my experience is with SuSE and Red Hat. On those distros, I am used to typing "su" and then supplying the root password. At that point my prompt changes to the root prompt and I "am" root. Does this not work in the 'Debian' world?

Here is what I see on the terminal:
maemo@maemo:/root$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
Sorry.
maemo@maemo:/root$

I know from reading the sudu man pages that it's primary purpose is to allow the execution of a command as supervisor or another user. This is not what I am trying to do - I want to be in a term session as root - or, in general, to know what the root password is for this nice little VM.

Hope this makes sense!

Thanks,

Steve