105
I F*cked up and I need help.
(lemm.ee)
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Someone has already given you a guide on how to change the password via grub params, however that might not be necessary. It's important that when you ask these questions you provide the exact command you're using and the exact things you changed, what I assume happened is that you removed yourself from the wheel group (which in Mint might be listed as Admin privileges), this is important because the
sudo
command (unless you've customised it) only works for members of the wheel group. Then you said you tried to access the root via terminal and it told you you didn't have permissions, I'm 99% sure that you tried something withsudo
here, which will no longer work because your user is not an admin anymore.So are you screwed? Nope, you can access the root user without the need for
sudo
. Most people when they want to have a root shell usesudo su
, in that commandsu
is the actual part that lets you login as root (in factsu
is short for ~~Switch~~ Substitute User, and you can switch to any user using it. Fun factsudo
is a short for ~~Switch~~ Substitute User and DO, so that you can run things as root without needing to login as root). As you might have already guessed just runningsu
and putting the root password should work. Then why do people usesudo su
? Becausesudo su
will ask you for YOUR password, whereassu
asks you for the ROOT password (which in most servers is different, but most home computers is the same). You set the two of them when installing the system (in fact it's very likely that you ticked a checkbox that said something like "use the same password for the root account").Edit: The correct therm used in the su manual is Substitute not switch as someone mentioned in a reply.
Huh, I always thought su stands for super user, but apparently it actually stands for substitute user (according to the manpage)
I don't think "substitute user" is the original meaning, and it's more like a retroactively applied acronym.
Looking at various old Unix manpages, it said various things in the past. In the HP-UX documentation it even lists three different variants in the same man page: "switch user", "set user" and "superuser".
"superuser" is probably the original meaning, because that's what it says in the Unix Manual 1st edition (1971): http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/su
I love Unix archeology :)
Wouldn't the password remain in the shell history? Or didn't that exist back then?
It probably wasn't such a concern back in 1971. I mean, even nowadays you still find programs where you can just add a login password to the command line.
Wow, that's terrible for security.
You can do
su
to change the user in the current shell. Afaik it just defaults to root if no user ist specified. Everytime you runsu
you actually dosu root
That said I always thought that it stands for switch user so intereresting to know that it‘s substitute.
I've heard people call it superuser since before Linux (AIX Unix a long time ago for example).
But substitute user makes sense since you can su to any user (just root is the default).
Usually the root password isn't set at all, and the only way to use rootprivileges is sudo. But OP isn't screwed, they can use a Live CD and chroot