The chkconfig it's a tool to edit the runlevels, or in other words, to choose which services are automatically initiated when the computer starts.

Unfortunately the chkconfig it's not available in Kubuntu so, if you come from SuSE, don't look for it.
There's however an excellent substitute and it's sysv-rc-conf

Due to safety reasons the operating systems of the Ubuntu project have the root account disabled.
We can may always execute commands as root doing:

sudo COMMAND

Of course that this is quite annoying specially when carrying out tasks demanding several steps as root.