Fedora temporarily obtain root previlages

Hii friends!!

i am quite a bit dealing with linux stuff i worked mostly on macosx unix side

i created a user phoenix during installation of fedora 14
now after installation i want some rights to do a task i usually use sudo to elevate to do a operation; i did the same here but its going on banging me with
"phoenix is not in sudoers file .this incident will be reported."

i read for a while and finally thought to add the user phoenix to wheel group

but can anyone explain me what happens when i add to wheel or some other group???
For my account phoenix should be a normal user but when i use sudo it should do root level operations what should i do for this ???? please help me .....

Please post the output of visudo and/or the contents of /etc/sudoers.

The default configuration of sudo allows members of whell group sudo-ing without password.

run 'visodo' to check the contents of the sudoers file. You should see a line like %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL which is what tells sudo to let the wheel group do anything without a password.

Why "wheel"? Nobody's quite sure, but it's traditional.