My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers. I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary. Grub takes very long to load with “welcome to grub” message. I just wanted a stable distro as arch broke and currupted my external ssd
My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers.
I don’t know what behavior you are seeing.
Install sudo, add the user to the sudo group, and log out and log back in again (okay, technically you could just sg sudo as that user rather than logging him out, but group privileges are assigned at login, and it’s probably easier to just log out).
I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary.
Normally running a command does execute a binary. You mean that you have to fully-specify the path to the binary, that it’s not in your PATH? Like, you’re typing /bin/ls rather than ls?
It’s probably easier for people to understand what’s going on if you just paste the output you’re seeing and indicate what it is that you expected to see.
When installing Debian, it asks you for a root password. If you enter one then you will not be added to the sudo group automatically. If you skip entering a root password, you will be added to sudo.
I always enter a root password and then once in the installed OS switch to the root account with su - then add my self to sudo with usermod -aG sudo beirdo-baggins
Then reboot.
Maybe they mean lacking wheel groups? Or not knowing how to invoke sudo with a specific user?
Debian’s got a sudo group, not a wheel group.
EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. Arch might use the wheel group and Debian the sudo group, and if he just copied his Arch sudoers file over his Debian one, it would reference the wheel group and wouldn’t work.
googles
Yeah, Arch has wheel.
https://linuxopsys.com/topics/add-user-to-sudoers-in-arch-linux
EDIT2: I bet he tried to add his user account explicitly to /etc/sudoers rather than just adding the account to the sudo group and just got the syntax wrong in one way or another, as the syntax of sudoers isn’t terribly intuitive.
In english you can use “they” if you dont know the persons pronouns ;D also pretty sure OP is female
But valid point, Debian is weird
Normally running a command does execute a binary.
I’m not certain, but I’m wondering if OP means that new programs don’t automatically get a “desktop” app or whatever. I’m often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu
Offtopic, but I had no use for desktop files in general, as I launch stuff from the command line, but I finally discovered a wonderful use for them. Steam creates a desktop file for Steam games it installs. Steam itself is…not all that amazing as a launcher. Gives you the last five games launched in a contextual menu from a tray icon, and a list of games you can search through in the client interface after you bring up the window and move to the Library tab. However, you can set up rofi to use desktop files as completions (one sets it up to complete on “drun”), and then rofi can act as your Steam game launcher, which is great. I can just whack a keystroke to invoke rofi, and then type a few characters of the game I want and whack enter, and rofi will prioritize by last-invoked. Really nice not having to slog through the Steam interface.
In the Steam interface you should be able to sort by recently used, and hide anything that’s not installed. Might make it easier to find your games :)
That’s basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows “start”… I don’t know what it’s called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.
You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.
I meant, for example, i have to run /usr/sbin/smartctl instead of just smartctl
Okay. I have my config files set up to add /sbin and /usr/sbin to my PATH – that’s probably a config that dates back at least a decade – but it looks like Debian defaults to not having /usr/sbin or /sbin in PATH for non-root users; you can see this in /etc/profile, where it’s only adding /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin, and /sbin to root’s PATH, but not to other users.
If you run su -l, then that’ll give you a login shell as root, and that’ll have those in the path.
You can also add them to a regular user’s path. I don’t know what the “right way” to modify PATH for a graphical desktop is these days, so I can’t give much help there; with xdm starting Xorg, which is what I do, it’s to put it in a ~/.xession file, something like:
export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games"
and for login bash shells, like for if you ssh into the system or log in on the console, in ~/.bash_profile, the same.
But GNOME under Wayland and all those new desktop environments probably have some way to modify PATH, something which they run at when you log in, and I don’t know the appropriate place to stick those or which you use.
When installing Debian, if you choose to enable a root account then sudo is not installed by default and your user isn’t added to the sudo group. Next time try to opt for not enabling the root account to have a similar experience to other distros. Debian does this doe security reasons but it’s annoying for users used to a certain way of doing things. Many distros just disable root account by default so you don’t see that issue.
Oh, is that what happens? Explains why I didn’t have sudo, thought it was a bug lol.
It sounds like you’re seeing a few different issues here and it makes me wonder if there’s some hardware issue that’s causing some of this or if the installation is botched (though it’s be odd for that to hose two different distros.
Last time I looked Debian didn’t include sudo by default, so you’d have to install it first. To add yourself to the sudoers group, log in as root and run usermod -aG sudo mariah (assuming that’s your username). Then reboot (logging out your user should work too, but better be thorough).
Grub sometimes includes a timeout longer than I like and you can edit that in the /etc/default/grub file to something of your liking.
Not sure what you mean about the commands, but maybe it’s an issue with your $PATH.
I don’t think that it’s the GRUB timeout that OP’s smacking into. That applies after the GRUB screen comes up, rather than before.
How does Arch breaks and corrupts an external ssd?
Beats me. I just started my windows single gpu passthrough vm and it froze so i rebooted and arch went into emergency mode. The ssd just wont mount. I had to remove it from fstab to boot
I don’t think it actually corrupted the SSD, perhaps a module is missing or such, and that’s why it goes into emergency mode. Have you tried mounting the drive from say, a live usb?
Arch will go into emergency mode whenever it can’t mount a volume in fstab on boot. If the drive is formatted as NTFS, I’ve had this exact problem. I think it has to do with windows marking the drive as dirty. I didn’t bother figuring out what the problem was, I just stopped trying to mount an NTFS drive on boot. Maybe you’d have better luck using the ntfs-3g driver?
Can you see the drive in Debian? Like, does it show up in lsblk output, which doesn’t rely on there being anything on the drive? If not, it may have failed. Like, not something that Arch did.
I think reinstalling Debian might be the best solution in this situation.
Nah Debian 12 is weird. I recently installed on a few systems and they all do the same — usermod isn’t in roots $PATH by default, and my user account wasn’t a sudoer by default.
I’ve added myself to sudo but I keep getting “kicked out” when I start a new shell. Have to newgrp sudo to be able to sudo again.
I’ve added myself to sudo but I keep getting “kicked out” when I start a new shell.
Group permissions from the /etc/group file get assigned at login. Each process will inherit group memberships from its parent.
You can see them for a process (self being the current process) in:
$ grep ^Groups: /proc/self/status
The gids there correspond to the gids in /etc/group.
That’s why the need to log out the user in question after adding the user to a group, unless you’re gonna use sg or similar to add that gid and then have all your new processes started by that process that you just started with the new gid.
You’ll see this with all user memberships in groups on Linux. It’s not behavior specific to Debian or specific to membership in the wheel or sudo group.
