Salix Forums

I think I have read the Start-Up Guide and searched the Wiki thoroughly, but there is one basic thing I still can't seem to get right. I can't run sudo commands in terminal and I can't run applications in the System category that require a password. Permission is denied.

So far I have only created one user account. I quote from the Start-Up Guide:

"By default, the first user created has access to sudo, any others do not; to allow them access as well, they need to be added to the wheel group."

In order to login I use the single account I created at installation and enter the password for it. So far so good. But whenever I try to use the same password to run sudo or a system app like Gslapt, I just get "Permission Denied". I haven't forgotten the password, because I can still use it to log in again. What's going on?

DCBX wrote:So far I have only created one user account.

Are you sure this is exactly how it happened? "I have only created one user account" is completely different than "I only have one user account now".

DCBX wrote:In order to login I use the single account I created at installation and enter the password for it. So far so good. But whenever I try to use the same password to run sudo or a system app like Gslapt, I just get "Permission Denied". I haven't forgotten the password, because I can still use it to log in again. What's going on?

Impossible.

Unless you're either:
1. typing it incorrectly
2. you're not typing what you think you're typing. Typical case for users who change their keyboard layouts and forget that they have done so.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. The problem is now solved, as explained below.

However, what you said was “impossible” apparently is possible. I eliminated the two points you mentioned as follows:
1. I logged off and back in again at least twenty times. Every time the password worked. Then I tried sudo or running Gslapt a similar number of times. Every time permission was denied. I admit my typing isn’t always perfect, but the probability that it was consistently perfect when logging in and consistently imperfect when trying to run sudo or Gslapt is very small.
2. Immediately after getting “Permission denied” I tried logging off and logging back in again. Log in was OK. The likelihood of anything altering the keyboard layout between these two actions seems extremely small.

Then, I checked the list of users using the command: cat /etc/passwd

Sure enough, there was another user with UID 1000 -- not the one I had created during installation. (The one I set up during installation was UID 1001). Judging from the user name, it seems to have been inherited from another Linux OS installation that had previously been on the same partition. So I ran the installer again and this time made sure to reformat before installing. That appears to have done the trick!