ubun2

Ok.  Bare with me a second.  Here's my partition scheme;
(200GB)/dev/sda1  /boot  500M/dev/sda2  LVM    100G

• / (root)
• /home
• /tmp
• /usr
• /var

/dev/sda5  swap 4G
 

I'm running ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
I had originally messed something up by accidentally changing permissions on /usr/bin to 777, which disabled me from using sudo.
fixing the permissions by root shell, and now when i try and start up my laptop it gets to the
 
"
Ubuntu
<progress bar thing here>
"
 
and then flashes between that screen and a black screen which says "*nmpd is running" or something.
 

How to create a root user account with superuser or administrative privileges in linux?