[Comm-en] sudo/su/etc setup | Re: Installation Issues

[Michael Shigorin]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 02:08:39PM -0800, Lyndon wrote:
> One time I did get ALT installed ok but I have this one main
> issue which always comes up after install. I cannot use the
> terminal as I keep getting the message, " This user is not in
> the sudoers list. This incident will be reported.

sudo(8) gets setup out-of-box in http://getalt.org/en/simply
flavour but it's generally considered up to the local root
to do that or not (unlike what e.g. Ubuntu does); the commonly
recommended way is to use su(8) -- note that ALT still holds to
how it was written down back then and our su(8) insists that
only the "su -" form resets the environment variables including
PATH and HOME to correspond to the target user's settings,
"su" keeps those.

Some of us still prefer to set su(8)'s permissions so that it's
not a SUID binary anymore through:

# control su restricted

and using sshd to switch to root via their ssh keypair with its
passphrase, optionally with ssh-agent and ssh-askpass (e.g.,
run ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and add the resulting pubkey line
to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and then ssh root at localhost).

> So far I have not been able to fix this issue and for now,
> at least, I have had to install another operating system,
> Arcolinux, in the meantime.
> 
> I would like to be able to reinstall sometime ALT Linux but
> need to be able to use the terminal. Any ideas on how to fix
> this ? 

Just use the terminal but set up sudo if you need;
through visudo(8), maybe in a form like this:

# EDITOR=mcedit visudo

See also:
* http://altlinux.org/su- (in Russian though)
* http://en.altlinux.org/control
* man sudo.conf
* man visudo

> Thanks so much. Otherwise, a great distro !!
> Happy New Year to you all.

Wish you a Happy New Year and merry Christmas, mate :-)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin / http://altlinux.org
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