Ubuntu – Always Sudo Privileges

You need to use the PolicyKit APIs to request the escalation of privileges. In general, you should only do so when it's absolutely necessary, and not run the application with escalated privileges at all times.

It's worth noting that if you only need root privileges on startup, you can and should start up as root, but then drop to an unprivileged user. If you're operating as a user-facing program, this probably means the user that ran the program; if this means a daemon, like an httpd or sshd, it probably means an incredibly locked-down user that's created specifically for your program to run under.

Also, there are graphical frontends to sudo called gksudo and kdsudo for GNOME and KDE, respectively. If someone recommends that you use these, don't. Be aware that these programs are deprecated in favor of PolicyKit, are not installed by default, and will probably get your app rejected.

This should help you. -a appends to the group and should only be used with -G, which is the groups to append the user. To answer your question fully, to add someone to the sudoers group and to reset the root password:

su
passwd root
Enter new Unix password:
Confirm new Unix password:

Then:

usermod -a -G sudo howdy

Once this is done, you will need to restart in order for the new changes (adding howdy to the sudo group) to take effect.